The Stricken Deer Or The Life Of Cowper

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THE STRICKEN DEER

Also hy Lord David Cecil

HARDY, THE NOVELIST
The Clark Lectures
delivered at Cambridge, 1942

EARLY VICTORIAN NOVELISTS
Essays in Revaluation of
Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes,
Trollope, George Eliot and
Mrs. Gaskell

SIR WALTER SCOTT
Limited Edition
Signed by the Author

THE YOUNG MELBOURNE
And the Story of his Marriage
with Caroline Lamb

I VHliam Coir per

pom the drawing by W\ Harvey after
L. Abbott in the National Portrait Gallery

LORD DAVID CECIL

THE STRICKEN DEER
or

THE LIFE OF COWPER

CONSTABLE COMPANY LTD
LONDON WC2

LONDON
Published bv
Constable and Company Ltd
10-12 Orange Street W'C 2

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Longmans Green and Company Ltd
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Fint puhhshcii . . 1^29

Reprinted , . *930

Second Edition . . . 1930

** Crown ConstahU " Edition 1933
Reprinted. . . , 1(^38

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PREFATORY NOTE .

CowPER has already been the subjeft of many books.
But these, when they have not been primarily studies
of his literary genius—like those of Mr. Goldwyn
Smith and Mr. Hugh Fausset—have been definitive
and documented biographies—like those of Hayley,
Southey, and Mr. Thomas Wright. My purpose is
rather, in the light of all the information gathered for
us in these more elaborate works and elsewhere, to tell
straightforwardly the Story of this extraordinary man,
with such analysis of his character and those of his
friends and his period as may seem necessary to make
it clear. We are able during large portions of his life
to do this in the moSt intimate detail. From the mass
of poems, letters and reminiscences that have come
down to us we can reconStruft, not only the outward
ordering of his life down to the way he spent each hour,
and every article of furniture in his room, but also the
trend 'and flufluation of his solitary thought. Only
twice, during his early manhood and in the period
of his second madness, are we conscious of a want of
sufficient information. But since history is only in¬
teresting as long as it is stridfly true, I have not
attempted to supply this want except by a few very
tentative conjectures. If, therefore, my pifture grows
at moments hazy, its central figure indi^indl, 1 ask
pardon of my readers, and solicit their indulgence.

Tii

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAOC

A PROLOGUE . I

I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.17

II. THE FIRST COLLAPSE.4^

III. THE EVANGELICAL PHASE .... 76

IV. THE CREATJVE PERIOD ... I45

V. THE FINAL DECLINE ..... 223

THE STRICKEN DEER

A PROLOGUE

Past periods, like foreign countries, become the
fashion. Ju^l as people like one sort of hat because
it suits the type or beauty they admire, so people are
attra^fed to a particular place or period because it
suits their prevailing mood. Mankind, in its reilless
search for some ideal and fairy country which satisfies
a fancy, dissatisfied with that in which it lives, will
identify it with the civilization of some other time or
people which appears to possess the qualities it moft
values, and to lack those which it moit dislikes. The
ancient world, Corinthian capitals, and Latin inscrip¬
tions were the fashion in the Italian renaissance; the
celeAial empire of China, porcelain, and short moral
fables about people with Oriental names were the
fashion in the eighteenth century; the Middle Ages,
Gothic tracery, and the Morte D'Arthur were the
fashion in the days of the Pre-Raphaelites. The
mode of a bygone age flourishes again; a curious
exotic, blooming in the warmth of the admiration of
a later day lon|; after its parent tree is withered and
dissolved back into earth.

But the later day does not confine itself to admiration.
It begins to imitate modes and ftyles and to adapt
them to its own circum^ances. The renaissance
despots built classical temples and wrote classical
poems and planted classical groves; the powdered
dilettanti of 1775 bought English chinoiserie vases

B

2

The Stricken Deer

and French chinoiserie hangings and Chippendale
chinoiserie chairs. The nineteenth century, thorough
in everything, was thoroughly Gothic. Its connoisseurs
made Gothic summer-houses, Gothic bathrooms,
Gothic umbrella ^ands. They filled the house with
ilained-glass windows and even called their children by
Gothic names—Blanche, Hubert, Edith.

But these imitations only serve to bring out in a
Wronger light the difference between the period they
interpret and their interpretation of it. T^ey re¬
create it in the image of their own desire; they Intensify
the elements that charm them; they modify those that
offend against their conventions. And the result is a
blend of the ^yle they are imitating and their own,
that, by its very indication of what they admired, is
an exquisitely charadleriftic example of their own
civilization.

There is nothing more typical of the English
eighteenth century than an eighteenth-century
chinoiserie chair, with all the flowering graces of
Pekin, tamed into the delicate regularity of Bath.
Nothing brings back the feel and atmosphere of the
fir^l French empire like an empire sofa, with its rigid
sphinx heads and garlands, and bundles of fasces copied
exaftly from an ancient sarcophagus, in brass and
mahogany, and upholstered in red ribbed silk. How
Viftorian are the Rowenas and Rebeccas of the
paintings illustrating Scott’s novels that covered the
walls of the Royal Academy from 1825 to 1850, with
their sloping shoulders and downcaSt eyes and jet-
black hair en bandeaux ! And the Arcadian shepherd
of Elizabethan paStoral, dressed in a mantle of blue
silk, his hair Stuck with gilly-flowers, spouting con¬
ceits; and the scholaStic-tongued sages of antiquity
of Dante’s Inferno ; and the sultans that Strut in so
Parisian a minuet through the tragedies of Voltaire.
How precisely, how intensely, they bring their age

3 Life of Cowper

before us by their every word and gesture! These
corporate creations, the spirit of one age expressed in
the dress of another, possess a fanciful charm of their
own; bouquelis whose scent mingles many flowers,
music whose harmony is made by a peculiar com¬
bination of instruments. But they derive this charm
from the vivid way in which the unwonted dress reveals
the individuality of its wearer. The period appears
more clearly itself because it is vainly trying to look
like something else.

To-day the eighteenth century is the fashion; we
print eighteenth-century memoirs; we reprint eigh¬
teenth-century novels; we anthologize eighteenth-
century poems; we translate eighteenth-century
romances. On weekdays we perform eighteenth-
century ballad operas; on Sundays eighteenth-century
comedies. Our moSl up-to-date writers eulogize
Baroque and Rococo; our moSl Olympian critics
prefer Mozart’s operas to Wagner’s. And, like earlier
ages, we imitate as well as admire. Modern architefts
design in a severely classical ftyle, all pilaster and
pediment. Modern ilory-tellefs emulate the gram¬
matical nakedness of Defoe. But we are as much the
creatures of the time we live in as were- the people of
other periods; and our interpretation of the eighteenth
century is no more like the reality than a renaissance
^fatue of Apollo is like a Greek ftatue of Apollo, or
the Houses of Parliament are like a Gothic cathedral.
People like the eighteenth century because they see
it as the Golden Age of the qualities they value; and
so they conceive it as possessing these qualities and no
others. They like its sensibility because they dislike
emotion, and it seems to express itself in emotions so
deliberate as hardly to deserve the name at all. They
profess to like pure form, whatever that may mean;
and the eighteenth century had a talent for form. So
they represent its music as all form and no matter, its

The Stricken Deer 4

novels all form and no morals, and its religion all form
and no faith. Finally, they dislike the nineteenth
century, and they see the eighteenth century as its
opposite, and therefore their idea * of it exaggerates
everything in which this opposition lies ; its elegance,
it cynicism, its impropriety, its frankness of speech,
its foppishness of manner. The eighteenth century
of their imagination is a series of salons, where people
with snuff-boxes and a worldly-wise outlook make
mots in a mood of urbane scepticism born of an ex¬
tensive experience of the brighter side of life in the
capitals of Europe.

It is the land of their dreams; but it is not at all
like the England of the eighteenth century, the
teeming, clamouring, irregular, enthralling England
of the eighteenth century. In order to mould the
age they love nearer to their heart’s desire, they have
successfully shattered it to bits. For one thing, their
idea is too homogeneous. Only countries of the
mind are so much of a piece. The paft does not, any
more than the present, escape that incompleteness,
that inconsistency which is the essential charafteriftic
of life as we know it, as opposed to life as we should
like it to be. An hi^orical period is not a water-tight
compartment, containing only what it has itself
created, sharing nothing with what has gone before
and what comes after. It is a tangle of movements
and forces, of various origin, sometimes intertwined
and sometimes running parallel, some beginning, some
in their prime,, some in decay; Streaked by anomalies
and freaks of nature; coloured by physical conditions,
by national charafteriftics, by personalities; Struck
across by unexpefted, inexplicable Stirrings of the
spirit of God or of man ; yet with every Strand part of
what is paSt or what is to come : a great river ever fed
bv new Streams, its course continuous and abrupt,
cnequered and unfaltering, now thundering over a

5 Lije oj Cowper

sudden cataraft, now partially diverted into a back¬
water, and carrying on its mysterious surface fragments
of wreckage, survivals of an earlier day, not yet dis¬
solved into oblivion.

To describe any period, then, as all of a piece is as
inaccurate as to paint a pifture of its Streets with all the
houses of the same age and Style. Even if the eigh¬
teenth-century spirit as we imagine it was really pre¬
valent in the eighteenth century, it would be as false
to imagine it as exclusively prevalent, as to imagine all
the furniture was made by Sheraton and all the decora¬
tion done by Adam. But it was very far from pre¬
vailing ; it is altogether too much made up of modish¬
ness and mockery. Of course, some of the typical
figures of the eighteenth century are modish and
mocking—Casanova, Voltaire, Lord CheSlerfield. But
though unlike in other respefts, they were alike in
outraging moSl of their contemporaries very much.
Casanova succeeded in shocking visitors to Venice
even more broadminded than those of our own day.
Lord Chesterfield was looked upon by the ordinary
man as having, in the words of Johnson, “ The manners
of a dancing maSler and the morals of a whore.”
While to imagine that Voltaire expressed the general
opinion of his time is as sensible as to imagine that
Jonah expressed the general opinion of Nineveh.
He represents a charafleriSlic and important aspeft
of eighteenth-century thought, a vivid thread in
its tangled skein, but anyone who thinks that it is
the only aspeft, above all in England, has a conception
of the period that is wrong from Start to finish. For
how many-sided the eighteenth century was can be
seen by anyone who looks at the mass of novels,
plays, poems, sermons, memoirs, letters and speeches
that go to make up a library of the period. If we
would find the true spirit of the eighteenth century
wc muSt leave the eighteenth century of to-day, the

The Stricken Deer

6

eighteenth century of the ftage, of the book illuftrator,
even of the hiftorian, and seek it in its own books.

For a happy moment let us shut the door on the
modern world and retire in fancy to some Auguftan
library. The curtains are drawn, the fire is lit,
outside the silence is broken only by the faint, crackling
whisper of the winter fro^f. How the firelight
gleams and flickers on the fluted mouldings of the
bookcases, on the faded calf and tarnished gold of
the serried rows of books : the slim duodecimo poems
and plays; the decent two-volumed oftavo novels;
the portly quarto sermons, six volumes, eight volumes,
ten volumes; the unity of brown, broken now and
again by a large tome of correspondence, green or
plum or crimson, only given to the public in our own
time. The whole eighteenth century is packed into
these white or yellowing pages; all its multifarious
aspects, its types, its moods, its morals, self-revealed;
the indefinable, unforgettable perfume of the period
breathing from every line of print. For the shorteft,
jdulleft letter really written in a pail age can bring its
atmosphere home to you as the moil vivid hiilorian
.of a later time can never do.

Here, through this long line of volumes, of corre¬
spondence, crystallized into a diamond immortality
by the fragile brilliance of Horace Walpole’s ilyle,
ilreams the life of that small dazzling Whig world
that ruled England, with its habits and fashions and
whims, its political secrets and its private scandals,
its heroes, its buffoons and its beauties. It is the world
of the nobleman who was educated till he was eleven
at his anceilral home by a tutor who was also the
chaplain; who, after a severely classical four years at
Eton, left England for the Grand Tour in his Berline;
who was speechless with shyness at Madame du
Deffand’s parties in Paris, who bought Guido Renis in
Bologna; who admired Frederick William Ts Guards

7 Life of Cowper

in Potsdam, Stepping together like giant marionettes
controlled by one hand; who came back to England;
married the daughter of a nobleman as Whig as
himself; sat for a pocket borough belonging to himself
or a relation; attacked Walpole or maybe Carteret;
played Loo; made rotund orations, Studded with
Latin quotations; colledted curious antiquities; laid
out his gardens in accordance with the grandiloquent

t )lans of Capability Brown; who spent half the year
ounging in the windows of Brooks’s and half among
the oaks and elms of his country seat; who was painted
in youth by Allan Ramsay, and in age by Romney;
who was brought up to like Pope, but grew to prefer
Ossian; who patronized Dr. Johnson; who talked
and wrote voluminous letters and composed compli¬
ments in verse; who laughed at the royal family and
drank too much port and died. It was a society at
once narrow and cosmopolitan, as much at home in
Paris as in London, but knowing few people in either.
It knew every aspedl of its world, but that world was
small. It liked painting and politics, but painting
meant Leonardo and Raphael, and nothing else, and
politics meant the Whig cause and the balance of
power, and nothing else. Even the classical learning
from which it quoted so freely was more Roman than
Greek, and more French than Roman: precise and
rhetorical, a colleftion of apothegms, full of patrician
independence^nd uninsular patriotism. It was con¬
ventional, too; lukewarm in religion, but scrupulous
about going to church; slack about morals, ^Irift
about the proprieties; often republican in theory,
always aristocratic in praftice.

But though it was outwardly so formal and so
cosmopolitan, it was really very English, impulsive,
copious, untidy, full of exceptions to the rule, of
eccentric charafters, excited by sudden guSls of
enthusiasm, that make it as different from that

The Stricken Deer

8

contemporary French society to which its con¬
ventions gave it an outward likeness as a portrait
by Gainsborough is unlike a paftel of Latour. No
Frenchman would have suddenly put up a ruined
caftle in his garden, like Lord Holland, or had fully-
grown cedar trees planted by torchlight, like Lord
Chatham. It was, indeed, the moil original, as it
was far and away the moil amusing and attractive,
society England has ever known. For its unqueilion-
ing acceptance of the conventional ilruClure of life
left its whole energy free to develop the individual.
It was because their world was so small that they could
touch so many sides of it, because they took the faCls
of exiilence for granted that they could cultivate its
graces, because they never doubted they were born
to rule that they could say, with Pitt, “ I believe I can
save the country, and no one else can.*’

But eighteenth-century England is not only its
ariilocracy. Take down this volume of Fielding.
Here you may see the life of the middle classes, the
life that we see in Smollett and Gillray and The Beggar's
Operay whose painter was Hogarth, not Reynolds,
whose engraver was not Bartolozzi, but Rowlandson;
a life spent among tradespeople in the town and squires
in the country, the life of the road and the tavern;
with its virtuous side lived in those decorous, irreligious,
classical churches with large-cushioned box pews and
a sounding-board over the pulpit; a»d its vicious
among the pimps and pickpockets, the gambling hells
and disorderly houses behind Drury Lane. It was a
life sensible, coarse and moral; in high spirits, but
with its feet planted firmly on the earth ; the life of the
plain man, in a decent brown-iluff suit and shoes with
^eel buckles, who lived over his shop, and went to
Vauxhall on a holiday and sat under Seed or Jortin on
Sunday; who gave money to an orphanage and took
his wife to see an execution. For its conception of

9 Lije of Cowper

morality is that expressed in Hogarth’s prints of the
idle and industrious apprentice. The idle apprentice
is hanged, the industrious apprentice becomes Lord
Mayor, You might fall into an occasional lapse among
the rosy, frankly-bosomed trollops and doxies of Covent
Garden, but it was soon proved to you by a sober and
unenthusiaStic clergyman that respedtability was the
beSt policy.

It had its adventurous side, too, that adventurous
side of life which filled eighteenth-century literature
from the novels of Defoe onwards. Adventure was
undertaken in a very matter-of-fadf spirit, drawing its
excitement from its incidents alone, and not from any
romantic light shed on them by the temperament of
its hero; the adventures of the young men who were
pressed for sailors, or taken by pirates, like Captain
Singleton; or who explored New Zealand with
Captain Cook; or were shipped off as incorrigible
rakes at eighteen years old, to make fortunes as Indian
nabobs, like William Hickey. It is a whimsical
contrail between the dying Mogul empire, ilill*
illumined by gleams of fantailic splendour, shadowed
by omens, wrapped in all the immemorial and coloured
myilery of the Eail, and its prosaic red-faced conquerors
with an unappeasable thiril for good living, and with¬
out a nerve in their bodies.

But the eighteenth century was not altogether
without nerves. Look at that fat colleftion of paper-
bound three-volume novels, about fashionable life.
They are the expression of that neurasthenia that at
its woril produced the vapours and at its beil Clarissa
Harlowe ; the condition of mind of the languid ladies,
with waxen hands and small caps poised dizzily on a
tall fan of hair, that droop at one so pensively out of
the canvases of the Reverend William Peters. Their
nerves afFefted not their imaginations, but their
feelings. Natural sentiments—filial love, maternal

The Stricken Deer lo

love, conjugal love—swelled to such an extent under
the tender and unrelaxed attention of their owners as
to endanger their healths. If one is to believe the
novelists who describe them, these ladies spent whole
days writing letters, seated on elegant, uncomfortable
chairs, except when they walked, muffled in swans-
down, to the willow tree on which the loved one had
carved their names. How absurd and morbid and
unreal it reads to us! But from time to time the
sentences melt into a delicate beauty for which in the
works of the robuft and healthy-minded we search in
vain.

For beauty in eighteenth-century literature always
comes as an expression of the feelings. Look at those
long, unread, unreadable shelves of poetry. The
descriptions of Nature by Thompson or Crabbe
are exaft, but they are untouched by the light that
never was on land or sea, but which illuminates all
great poetry. They would convey no pleasure to a
reader who did not know the English scenery they
were describing and therefore could not recognize how
accurate the description was. Only when the heart of
the poet is touched does his poem glow into real
beauty, the sentiment gaining an added ring of pathos
from the formal language in which it is expressed.

“ For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey.

This pleasing anxious being c^er resign’d,

Left the warm precin6ls of the cheerful day,

Nor caft one longing, lingering look behind ?

On some fond breaft the parting soul relies.

Some pious drops the closing eye requires,

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of nature cries,

Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.”

Horace Walpole, Fielding, Hickey, Richardson,
Gray, what differences of outlook do these names
conjure up I I cannot think of a single quality common

11 Lije oj Cowper

to them all, except a uniform unlikeness to the modern
idea of the eighteenth century. And they do not
exhauft the varieties of the eighteenth-century scene.
There are the aftrologers and magicians, Cagliostro
and Mesmer, whose practices quiver with a lurid light
round the French monarchy in its decay. The
Jacobites, shabby, silly, romantic; the miners of
Cornwall, howling and foaming at the mouth under
the eloquence of the Methodists; the bishops, whose
dioceses were in Wales and whose residences were in
London, and who edited, with dignity, the more
scabrous classical authors.

But there is another Strain in the skein of the period,
that cannot be so briefly dismissed. I mean that
literary intelligentsia which derived from Addison and
reached its zenith in the Club; that centred round
Burke and Garrick and Goldsmith and Miss Burney,
but which could extend to include Gibbon on the one
hand and Mrs. Barbauld on the other; the circle whose
greatest figure is Dr. Johnson, and whose spirit, linger¬
ing on into a new century, flowered pnee more, a late
autumnal blooming, in the chaSte talent of Jane AuSten.

If eighteenth-century England muSt have typical
representatives, these are the typical representatives
or the English eighteenth century. The essential
I charafteriStic of their point of view was a disbelief in
I extremes. They were gregarious but not giddy,
Slay-at-home but not solitary, often devout but never
mySlical; if urban in their taSles, not modish, if rural,
without any transcendental sentiment about nature;
plain-spoken but not salacious, domeSlic without
sentimentality. They disliked the paradoxical, the
ccSlatic, because they thought them false. What
was the value of an idea, however entertaining or
original, if its conclusions could not be carried out
in ordinary life, or of an emotion, however intoxi¬
cating, that could not Sland the wear and tear of

The Stricken Deer

I 2

f rosaic every-day ? But they were not cynical,
ndeed, their di^lruft of the extreme arose from their
deep belief in the moral purpose of “exigence, and their
consequent di^lruft of any fancy or feeling that might
di^raft them from this purpose. You lived in order
to be good; theories and feelings were valuable in so
far as they helped you in this, and no further. They
despised all speculation that was not prafticable, all
emotion that was not durable. With a robuft and
rational capacity for enjoying themselves, they thought
self-pity and self-depreciation neither sensible nor
healthy. But they looked at life with open eyes, and
they were too honest and too clear-sighted to expeft
very much from it.

The shelf of their works is long indeed, and the be^l
books of their time are on it. They wrote the beft
biography, the beft history, the heSt political pamphlets,
and they rocked the cradle of the dome^lic novel.
And they gave the literary tone to other writers whose
lives were lived far from their company and according
to ideas not theirs. Of these not the lea^ distinguished
was William Cowper, the poet, whose Story is the
subject of this book.

His poems are not much read now. Bound in
solid leather and adorned with the sober magnificence
of gilt lettering, they reSt upon the upper shelves of
old-fashioned libraries, unread from year’s end to
year’s end, their backs growing drab, drained of hue
and luStre by the Strong, destroying sunlight. They
are become merely furniture, less valued because less
noticeable than the globes and grandfather clocks
and greying mezzotints that crowd the room around
them. When, on tiptoe, one drags a volume from its
place and opens it, pouf—the page is clouded for a
moment by the shaking out of the duSt that has
accumulated for so long there. And the words
seem duSly and faded as the paper on which they are

13 Lije oj Cowper

printed. Pedantic epigram, antiquated compliment,
pompous, didailic apoilrophe, follow one another,
as lifeless as the half-obliterated signs on an ancient
and undeciphered papyrus. It seems impossible to
believe that this was ever the genuine expression,
however formal, of a living person’s mind. And
then suddenly one’s attention is caught by a chance
word; the page ftirs to life; a bit of the English
countryside appears before one’s mental eye as
vividly and exaftly as though one really saw it; or
an ephemeral trifle, a copy of verses addressed to Miss
M. or Mr. D., laughs out of the page with the pleasant
colloquial intimacy of a voice heard over the teacups
in the next room. And now and again, as if from the
brings of a tarnished, disused harp tumbled againft
in one’s rambles round the library, there rises from the
old book a strain of music, simple, plangent, and of a
piercing pathos, that fairly clutches at the heart.

To me the waves that ceaseless broke
Upon the dangerous coaft
Hoarsely and ominously spoke
Of all my treasure lo^.

Your sea of troubles you have pa^l
And found the peaceful shore,

I tempeft-tossed and wrecked at laft
Come home to port no more.”

Here is no Byronic pessimism, rhetorical, ex¬
aggerated, the expression of a pofture or at beft a
passing mood. Through these quiet verses trembles
the true voice of despair.

And the contrail between them and the wooden
versification in which they are embedded is not more
striking than it is between them and the poems of
Nature or of home in which, alone of all his other work,
Cowper rises to real poetry. These are the parallels
in verse of Cranford and Our Village in prose. He
paints with simple pathos and gentle humour the

The Stricken Deer

*4

home life of country gentlemen and dolors and
clergymen in the late eighteenth and earl^ nineteenth
centuries; peaceful, cosy, friendly, civilized, full of
small excitements, and family jokes, and innocent
enjoyments; knitting and sketching and playing on
the pianoforte and reading aloud and cribbage and a
little harmless gossip; easily shocked, easily amused;
enaffed in Judies and drawing-rooms furnished with
Heppelwhite chairs, the walls hung with silhouettes
and samplers, and the tightly-shut windows with
curtains of striped chintz.

“ Now ftir the fire, and close the shutters faft,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a ileamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.**

And his Nature poetry describes the same life out¬
doors. It is authentic English landscape; not the
wild, naked landscape of the North, but the tamed
country of the Home Counties, coated with human
associations. And Cowper’s mood is tamed too;
amused, contemplative, passive; observant of every¬
thing, carried away by nothing. He might know more
about plants and trees than the ladies and gentlemen
of his acquaintance, but that is because they are in his
line, as hunting or painting on silk might be in theirs.

Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.

How airy and how light the graceful arch,

Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems! While beneath
The chequered earth seems reftless as the flood
Brushed by the wind, so sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick.

And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves
Play wanton, every moment, every spot.**

15 Life oj Cowper

What is there in common between the la^l two (Quota¬
tions and the overpowering grief, without alleviation
and without hope, of the fir^ r What sort of man was
he that could write all three ? What sort of life that
could embrace three such different moods ? We look
at his portrait, and the same anomaly ftrikes us. The
face is a plain, everyday sort of face, with ruddy,
weather-beaten cheeks, and a wide, gentle mouth.
The set of the lips, precise yet kindly, shows refinement,
but it is an old-maidish kind of refinement; and the
impression of old-maidishness is added to by the
poet’s curious head-gear—a sort of homely English
version of a turban, finished off on top with a neat
white bow.

But out of this face glance a pair of eyes which
change its whole expression; startled, speaking eyes,
fixed on something outside the picture which we cannot
see, in fear, in horror, in frenzy; luminous, dilated
orbs; the eyes of an artift, of a seer, can it be of a
madman ?

This duality is the central fail of Cowper’s life.
We search the little heap of dingy volumes, the few
faded bundles of correspondence, that are all that
remain to us of the endless, thrilling panorama of
his earthly existence; all the evidence, conscious or
unconscious, that we can gather from his own entranc¬
ing letters, the pompous panegyrics of his friends, the
chance words of his acquaintance, the long-winded
exhortations of his spiritual dire(Sl:ors. And there
emerges a drama whose a(^lion is as simple, as strange,
and as terrible, as that of a classical tragedy. It took
place in a small circle in the sobered and moil peace¬
ful section of the sober, peaceful, professional class of
the day, its humdrum cheerfulness much further
removed from tragedy than the glittering whirl of
fashionable society or the harsh and unremitting
druggies of the very poor. And Cowper himself, in

The Stricken Deer i6

his virtues and limitations, is the very epitome of his
environment: scrupulous, timid, a little provincial,
weak on the logical side; but candid, conftant,
cultivated, humorous, skilled in the small taftfulness,
the minor charities of domestic life. He felt more
intensely and expressed himself with greater brilliance
than the people round him; but what he felt was what
they felt; and his superior sensitiveness and brilliance
only helped him to express it more exactly.

But he was under a curse. From his earliest years
there loomed over him, born in disease, nurtured in
fanaticism, the frightful spectre of religious madness.
And his life resolved itself into a ftruggle, fought to
the death, between the daylit serenity of his natural
circumstances and the powers of darkness hidden in
his heart. For a time it seemed that they would be
defeated. Yet even when the light shone moSl
brightly on his face, the shadow lurked behind his back;
around the sunny, grassy meadows crouched the black
armies of horror and despair. At a moment’s weakness
they would advance; inch by inch they gained ground;
till, with a laSl scream of anguish, his tortured spirit
sank, overwhelmed.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, I73I-I75'2

From the the atmosphere in which Cowper

passed his life was domeftic. He was born in the
country; but the country was the country of Hert¬
fordshire, even in those days the leait sequestered of
all the districts in England not confessedly urban.
The small green Hertfordshire landscape, with its
flattish fields and leafy coppices and well-kept canals,
with here and there the blue smoke of a chimney,
rising from one of the placid red-brick cottages with
which the country is speckled, was the firSt view of the
world that he saw from the sash-windows of his father's
reftory of Great BerkhamSled. And his life in that
sleepy, well-to-do little town was as comfortable and
quiet as the scenery surrounding it. The Cowpers
were a large, respeftable family, connefted, though
distantly, with an earl, and boasting among their
moil recent members a Speaker of the House of
Commons. And on his mother's side William was
connefted with the Donnes, a family honourably known
all over Norfolk, who traced their pedigree back as far
as the great Dean Donne of St. Paul's. It is a
whimsical thought that this eccentric sixteenth-
century divine, alone of Cowper’s family, could have
truly underilood and expressed the pity and terror of
his spiritual tragedy.

‘On both sides his relations were numerous, though
legitimate; and much of Cowper's memories of his
early years was concerned with visits to and from little
c 17

The Stricken Deer i8

Donnes and Cowpers—racing round the garden with
them, picking currants in the orchard, giggling in
the parlour. But he was a shy child; his affeftions
were concentrated on what he was moft used to;
and the dominating faft of his early life was his mother.
His father, a prosperous Anglican clergyman, innocent
of mysticism, did not play much part in his existence.
Few children’s fathers are intimate with them till they
are ten years old at leaft; and intimacy to Cowper
implied that caressing confidence, those small endear¬
ments, which are peculiarly maternal. His father was
always the papa of Anne and Jane Taylor’s poems;
whom one was fond of as one was fond of one’s old
home, but who, like one’s old home, formed part of
the background of life, and took his walks and wrote
his sermons and, if he was Mr. Cowper, composed
ballads, with the unnoticed regularity of the seasons.

He felt a more personal interest in his brother.
But the deepest affeftion of which his heart was capable
was poured out on that mother from whom he had
inherited his eyes and his mouth and his temperament.
It is a great mi^ake to think that people’s charafters
alter as they grow older; though different circum-
ilances may bring different sides of them into promi¬
nence. Cowper the child was like Cowper the man : a
defeati^, hating decisions, frightened of the unknown;
the creature, not the creator, of his deftiny; liking
sonieone or something on which to lean. But he had
a genius for affedfion, and would devote himself to
anyone he loved with all the strength of a nature
humble, Aeadfa^, exquisitely tender, and nearly selfless.
His mother satisfied all his needs; he worshipped
her, and she sheltered him from the onslaught of
an exigence he was not coarse or self-confident
enough to face by himself. It was she who showed
him how to prick out a paper pattern of pinks, violets
and jessamine from the figured brocade of her gown ;

19 Lije of Cowper

who came to say good-night to him in bed; who,
when he was old enough to do lessons, wrapped him
up in his red cap and velvet cloak and sent him off to
learn his book at the dame’s school down the ftreet;
who waited smiling with “ a biscuit or confeftionery
plum ” for him on his return ; who soothed his brows
with lavender water when he had a headache. And it
was from her homely piety he learnt the elements of
that faith which was to bring him the few fleeting
moments of ec^lasy he was ever to know.

For these firft six years of his life were the only
unshadowed ones. As time went on his mother’s
figure shone forth in his memory as the beneficent and
omnipotent goddess of that golden age when he was
absolutely happy. Forty-seven years later he writes:
“ I can truly say that not a week passes, perhaps I might
with equal veracity say a day, in which I do not think
of her.” And when, a grey-headed man of fifty-nine,
scarred with agony and achievement, he was given her
pifture, he was in a tremor; passionately kissed it;
and hung it at the end of his bed, that it might be the
firft thing on which his eye alighted when he woke.

But when he was six the evil fate that was to pursue
him through life struck its fir^l blow. His mother
died. He watched from his nursery window the
funeral cavalcade trail off; and as he turned away in
tears, his nurse, to comfort him, told him his mother
was coming back to-morrow. But to-morrow came,
and another, and another, and she never came back.
The firft of his life’s illusions was shattered.

It was tragic, for no one was less qualified than
Cowper to live the independent life of an orphan. The
support round which his shy, clinging nature had
wound itself had been suddenly taken away; the old
idyllic life at ” pailoral ” Berkham^Ied was over for
ever when its centre was gone. But a worse blow
was to follow. His father^ uncertain what to do with

The Stricken Deer

20

him at home, sent him to school at the small town of^
Market Street, about seven miles from Berkhamfted.
Going away to school for the fir^l time is as purely
painful an experience as there is in moft men’s lives.
It is like a rehearsal of one’s execution. Strung up
by two or three weeks’ agonized and helpless anticipa¬
tion, relentlessly, inevitably, the day arrives when one
is plunged into a world probably hostile and certainly
unknown, without a single link to bind one to the world
of one’s experience. But such a fate, cruel in any case,
was for Cowper especially cruel. By temperament he
faftened himself with a peculiarly tenacious hold to the
people and places to which he was accustomed, and
now, when he was already tottering under the loss of a
mother around whom his whole world revolved, his
laSt roots were cut from beneath him, and he was
deposited, bruised and bleedirig, in a place where there
was not a face, not a tree, not a smell, he had ever
known before.

And it was a place of torment. Boys have never
been humane; nor did the robuSl axioms that governed
eighteenth-century education believe in protefting
people from the natural discipline administered to
them by their contemporaries. Cowper, shrinking,
lonely, six years old, was quite incapable of Standing up
for himself. With the consequence that withm a
short time of his arrival he had become a mere
quivering jelly of fear. He was so abjectly terrified
of his chief tormentor, an overgrown lout of fifteen,
that he only recognized him by his buckled shoes;
he had never dared to lift his eyes to his face. Such
a situation could not go on for long even in those days;
his tormentor was expelled. But Cowper’s nervous
syStem was ruined for life.

Such sufferings alone would be quite enough to
account for it. But obscure hints reach us of a more
sombre cause for Cowper’s youthful sufferings. It is

21

Life of Copper

alleged that he suffered from an intimate deformity,
and from early years the thought of it preyed on his
mind. The whole subjeft is mysterious. In later life
his emotional experience was normal and developed
perfectly spontaneously. On the other hand, he never
was a passionate man; and there are certain fafts in
his later life for which such a deformity would offer a
convincing explanation. If he was deformed there
is no doubt that he muSt have learnt about it early,
possibly from the deriding Ups of his tormentors.
The cffe£l on him would inevitably have been disastrous.
Boys dislike above all things to be different from
other people: nor was Cowper of an age to eStimate
coolly the relative importance of his abnormality.

At any rate, from whatever cause, he left Market
Street with the rooted feeling that he was different
from other people, different from no fault of his own,
but differing for the worse. It was morbid of him,
because no one had more in common with his fellow
men, and for the reSl of his life he was unusually
attraftive to every type, age and sex. But there
remained buried in the hidden foundations of his mind
the idea that he was under a dark and shameful curse;
that other people could not help him, for he was not
as they were; that he Started life with the dice loaded
againft him, and come what might, in the end he would
jlose the game. He was despondent by nature, and his
'firSl experience of the world had proved to him that
; his despondency was justified.

But his Strange sufferings were visited by consola¬
tions not less remote from the ordinary child’s experi¬
ence. One day he was huddling on a bench in the
deserted classroom, free for one short moment from
that terrible pair of feet—cruel, purposeful feet;
heard on the ftairs, in his bedroom, in the garden,
now creeping, now scampering, now climbing, but
always in pursuit of him; awful, headless feet, who

22

The Stricken Deer

haunted him in his dreams, who might even now be
dealing up behind him to trample on his raw and
shuddering spirit. His dazed mind wandered back
to that happy home life, so di^ant that it seemed like a
^ory told long ago and now forgotten. He saw in
his mind’s eye his mother, and himself sitting beside
her while she read to him. Suddenly there flashed
into his mind a fragment of the Bible, heard often in
those days, but now fraught with a new and tremendous
significance: “ I fear nothing that man can do unto
me.” His whole being was filled with a Grange
spiritual exaltation, far more intense than the happiness
of his early childhood; for that arose only from the
absence of sorrow, and this vanquished sorrow in her
extreme^ citadel. The forlorn child, hiding away
from his bullying school-fellows, turned and faced his
fate with the unearthly serenity of the my^ic and the
martyr. What did it matter what man could do to
him r His soul was inviolate, at one with itself,’ at
one with the Divine Spirit from which it sprang. It
was only for a moment—and then he was back in the
schoolroom, miserable, homesick, in fear, above all,
of those terrible feet. But that moment had made as
deep an impression on him as the sufferings that
preceded it. He never forgot what he had felt. In
the brief prologue of his fir^ school-time, the two
protagoniils of his mental tragedy, the demon of his
despair and the angel of his consolation, had both
made their appearance on the ftage.

Having made their bow, they retired; and the scene
changes to comedy. For the next fourteen years his
life returned to its ordinary, comfortable, daylight
key. ; Buried in the recesses of his memory, the
incident of his firA school was to all appearance for¬
gotten. In the light of his common day, nightmare
and vision soon grew equally dream-like,the recolleftion
of a life vague, painful, and utterly unconne^ed with

23 Lije of Cowper

present normal existence. Children look forward, not
back; their spirits are so resilient that whatever inward
bruises their nervous systems have sustained are hidden,
and they seem perfeftly well again. The obscene,
crawling bca^s had sunk to sleep in the furthest
corners of Cowper’s spirit. Later on they might bestir
themselves and come forward and pounce. But for
the present all was soothing and unshadowed, at the
house of Mr. Disney, the oculift, where Cowper was
sent to be cured of some specks on his eyes. Mrs.
Disney was an oculist too; no one seemed certain
which one went to consult. But they were both very
amiable people, though they did not have family
prayers. And the days passed in an easy round of
treatment, walks, and a few mild lessons. There were
holidays too: rambles alone, or trotting by his father
through the woods and commons round Berkhamfted,
already heavy with sentimental associations for him;
and visits to his Donne cousins in Norfolk, where he
made the ilill, autumnal garden ring with his and
Harriet’s shouts, and chattered to Cailres, and rocked
tiny Rose on his knee and, when the curtains were '
drawn and the candles lit, recited Gay’s fable of The
Hare with Many Friends, in a high, treble voice, to the
assembled company.

The years rolled by; his eyes got better; and he
was sent to Weilminiler. He muft have seen the
gate of his second school chilled with apprehension,
remembering his experience at his firft. But if he
did, he was agreeably surprised. The easy flow of
his days was not interrupted. Weftminfter was as
pleasant as Berkhamiled or the house of Mr. Disney.
All around him surged and roared the palpitating,
many-coloured London of 1741. Nightly the torch-
lit coaches joftled one another on the way to Mas-
^erade and Rout; weekly the crowds swarmed to
Tyburn to see a woman hanged for stealing a yard of

The Stricken Deer 24

silk; Fielding, his aquiline nose bent over the paper,
finished Joseph Andrews ; Peg Woffington took the
town by ftorm in the peruke and satin breeches of Sir
Harry Wildair; Horace Walpole, juft back from
France, arranged objefts of virfu in his house in
Arlington Street; while every night, only a few
hundred yards from where Cowper worked, old Sir
Robert, tottering to his fall after his long ascendancy
of twenty years, defended himself with dogged
shrewdness againft the fiery eloquence of the Boys
and the Patriots. But the even tenor of Weftminfter
cxiftcnce was little difturbed by the thundering tide
of life that ebbed and flowed around it. Govern¬
ments might rise and fall, men commit crimes and be
hanged for them, waiftcoats get longer or shorter,
but the boys and mafters of Weftminfter pursued with
an undeviating regularity the curriculum prescribed
for them in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Like the
pool in the middle of a cyclone, the school seemed all
the calmer for the swirling rush surrounding it on every
side. Every morning the deep bell sounded, the boys
toiled or skimmed through their Latin prose, prayed
in Weftminfter Abbey, played knuckle-taw if they
were small, or cricket if they were bigger, under the
green or fading plane trees.

The little world had its incidents, too. Young
Lord Higham Ferrers and his friends kept the school
alive by their pranks. Everyone talked of how he had
visited the school dressed as a lady of title and was
carried up the great hall in a sedan-chair, followed by
the giggling boys, and preceded by the obsequiously
bowing head mafter; or of how the little Duke of
Richmond had set “ VinnyBourne, the classical
mafter’s wig alight in order to have the pleasure of
boxing his ears to put the flames out. Or Cowper
himself did a good copy of Latin verses that were
passed round, to the admiration of the mafters, and

25 Lije of Cowper

rewarded with a silver groat. He liked school very
well; he was by nature a scholar. To the end of his
life his genius was not creative except under the ftress
of intense emotion. He had not a sufficiently ilrong
imagination. But though he could not weave, he could
embroider. He had an agreeable individual fancy and
a capacity for painstaking and exaft work; given a
subjeft, he could make a very pretty thing of it. This
was juSl what was wanted for success in the scholarship
of his day. Cowper’s verses followed the beSt models,
and yet were adorned by that touch of originality which
marked them as his own. His classical Style was
formed by kind, untidy, talented “ Vinny ’’ Bourne,
of whom he grew very fond. At WeStminSter
Cowper taSted the sweets of friendship for the firSl
time. The boys were a distinguished lot. Looking
down the packed lines of the assembled school, beside
the humorous, gentle countenance of Cowper one’s
eye w^ould have lighted on the faces of Colman, Elijah
Impey and the pale cheek and lofty brow of Warren
Hastings. The impression made by tha great before
their greatness is known is a fascinating Study. Did
Hastings move among his school-fellows Stamped with
the solemn seal of one whose deStiny it was to direct
the fate of millions under an alien sun "i Was Cowper
himself marked by his closeSt friends as possessing a
mysterious, individual something which, had they
known it, implied that power of expression which
alone can communicate with future generations and
achieve for its owner a printed immortality ? Idle
speculations 1 Down what obscure viStas do they lead
us! Far from Cowper laughing with Legge and
Lloyd and dear Russell and the reSt of his friends.
How he loved them 1 What fun he had with them,
playing cricket—he was good at cricket—or arguing
about the right way to translate Homer or, on his
leave-out days, examining the glittering weapons on

The Stricken Deer

26

the walls of the Tower or faring at the lunatics at
Bedlam 1 “ I was not altogether insensible of the

misery of these poor captives,” he wrote, “ but the
madnessof them had such a humorous air,and displayed
itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was im¬
possible not to be entertained; at the same time that
I was angry with myself for being so.” Poor Cowper 1
he was not always to laugh so easily at madness.
Sometimes they would go further afield and spend a day
in the country, so close to London then; and return
home tired and hungry, their mouths Gained with the
blackberries and “ sloes austere ” which were all they
had had to eat during the day. Though he liked
WeilminSler, Cowper was a countryman by taife and
education. He had lived the happieft days of his life
there, and he was happie^ there ^ill.

He had his solitary pleasures, too. He loved
animals; they provided a channel for his flow of
natural tenderness. He bought a mouse. However,
it ate its children, and he got rid of it in disguft.
Later, he took to writing verses, mostly little occasional
pieces for his friends on “ A Lady’s Shoe Loft at
Bath,” or some such subjeft. But when he was in a
more serious mood his mind returned irresiftibly to
the woods and lanes he loved, and whose leafy silence
afforded such balm to his sensitive spirit.

All this tended to make him mbre cheerful.
Children have very little humour, even if their lives
are happy; and Cowper’s, as we have seen, was only
partially that. Nor does humour flourish in solitude.
One muft take oneself seriously alone. But in the
social warmth of his friends’ company his spirit
expanded and flowered into a delicious self-deprecating
irony which lights up the few scraps of his writing that
survive from this part of his life, and which, except at
his very gloomieft, was to shimmer round every
sentence he wrote.

27 Lije of Cowper

But he was not at peace. For he was continually
worried by small fears. } Sometimes they were of
something concrete: that he was going to get
into trouble at school. In consequence he grew as
skilful as mo^l public-school boys at telling a
ready and convincing lie. But generally his rears
^ were more subjeftive. When he was eleven he was
possessed by the idea that he had got consumption.
He was too shy to ask anyone about it, so that for years
the horrible idea lingered in his thoughts, and would
suddenly cross his mind when he was sitting, talking
, or writing, and ilrike a chill to his heart. But worse
than the fear of illness was the fear of death. One
evening he was picking his way among the grave¬
stones of St. Margaret’s on his way home to bed. A
blanket of darkness enveloped the world. It was a
moonless, Starless night. The great buildings that
crowded him in on every side might have been a hundred
miles away for all he could see of them. The only
sound that broke the Stillness was the recurring crunch
of the sexton’s spade digging a grave. Suddenly
Cowper felt his leg Struck by a round objeit; he bent
•down to examine it by the light of the dark lantern he
carried in his hand. The light shone on the eyeless
sockets, the smooth, repulsive contours of a human
skull. With a sickening Stab of fear he realized the
transitoriness of human life. What good was it to
avoid other dangers when here was a danger that
could never be avoided ? Every minute, every day,
every year that one lived, was only a year, a day, a
minute nearer this. Friends, books, what were they ?
Insubstantial masks conjured up by man to hide this
bald, grinning horror that was the only reality. Dis-
tra^ oneself as one might, forget it if one could, this
was what one came to in the end. The joys of life
turned to ashes in his mouth, and he rushed shudder-
4 jtig home. His horror was followed by a Strange

The Stricken Deer

28

rcaftion. With exhilaration he felt that whatever
happened to other people, he, William Cowper, was
fated never to die. But this feeling did not laft. The
terror of death was added to the other terrors of
exigence.

The truth was that at the bottom he had no con¬
fidence in life. By nature nervous and despondent,
only an untroubled upbringing and the undivided
personal attention of someone he loved and trusted
could have persuaded him into anything like optimism.
He needed the support of a solid foundation or realized
happiness before he could meet the world with any
confidence. But at the very outset of his life he had
received two violent shocks. The firft, the loss of his
mother, by removing the corner-^tone of his childish
exigence removed also his belief in the ^lability of
human happiness, and taught him to feel that one muft
not tru^l in the continuance of the moSt assured source
of protection. The second, the torments he suffered
at his firft school, convinced him that life was even
crueller than he had feared, and that he was the specially
selected objeCt of its cruelty. As time passed he ceased
to think of his youthful sufferings; at times even
forgot them. But he had loft his nerve. Underneath
the ebb and flow of his daily thoughts there was always
the half-conscious feeling that life was trying to hurt
him and it was no use relying on any earthly defence,
however ftrong it might seem. It was not juft that he
could not ftand a row. If he had not a real cause for
fear he invented one; and as faft as he freed himself
from that, he fell a prey to another. For they frightened
him not in themselves, but as the changing manifefta-
tions of a conftant diftruft of life.

sFor such ills religion was the only real remedy.
The work and play of ordinary mundane cxiftence
might diftraft him from his hidden fears, but they
could not remove them; for they moved on a different

29 Lije of Cowper

plane. In the light of common day his terrors would
have looked shadowy indeed, but it was of their nature
that they never saw such a light. He might feel
perfectly at ease when he was running about the school
yard; but when the lights were extinguished and he
was alone in bed the nameless horrors would return,
the more frightful for their short oblivion. But religion
did not only drive them to their lairs ; it rounded them
up and cleared them out. Alone it met them on their
own ground; armed Cowper with a spiritual sword
to combat the enemies of the spirit; prescribed a
celestial antidote to the poisonous fear of dishonour,
disease and death. The ultimate source of all happi¬
ness was the soul; and over the soul they had no power.
He had felt this that morning in Market Street; and
now and again, notably during the time he was being
prepared for confirmation, he felt it ftill. For a
moment it seemed to be of no consequence if he did
lose his name or his health or his life. The only
treasure worth having was laid up in heaven, and that
was his for ever.

Unluckily his anxious mind, searching suspiciously
for the thorn beneath every rose, soon began to deteft
as much cause for alarm in the que^ion of his spiritual
as of his material salvation. He felt that his moments
of religious comfort were vouchsafed to him in order
to win him to the Chriftlan life, by showing him a
glimpse of the heaven it was in his power to attain to.
But It is not easy to live a life of au^lere devotion if
you are a growing boy, enjoying yourself at a public
school; and Cowper’s life followed much the same
course as it would have done if he had had no religion
at all. The result was that the whole subject grew
as disquieting to him as the fear it was its funftion
to dispel. He felt he would never be able to live up to
his beliefs. Would Heaven then withdraw its com¬
forts in this world } Very likely. And in the next.

The Stricken Deer 30

worse punishment might follow. Uneasily he diverted
his mind from the subjeff.

However, it is foolish to emphasize the importance
of these youthful worries. Cowper’s nervous sy^em
was never so deranged as to render his views abnormal
and deluded, not to be treated as those of a reasonable
man. Life is precarious, tragic, surrounded by
dangers; and if delicate and highly ^rung people are
peculiarly conscious of this, it is because they alone are
fully alive to their true situation; and are not, like the
healthy, the dupes of their own good dige^ions.
Youth, unacquainted with the world, dazzled by the
enchanting prospeft before it, is proverbially unaware
of the possibility of failure and death; and Cowper’s
only abnormality is his premature delivery from the
illusions of youth. Indeed, his nervous troubles
were little more than the crises every imaginative boy
goes through between the ages of twelve and twenty.
And they occupied a very small part of his time. For
one agitated night, he passed thirty in comfortable
sleep; and from the wor^f fear he could be di^rafted
by any ephemeral pleasure. On the whole he was very
happy. The only formidable faft in his mental
condition was that his happiness was founded on
nothing Wronger than the natural energy and spirits of
boyhood ; so that, if later he was attacked by a serious
trouble, he had no settled confidence in the probability
of ultimate happiness, with which to withiland its
assault; which, coupled with his early acquired sense
of the danger of human exigence, might, in a tempera¬
ment like his, lead to a cata^rophe.

The years passed. Walpole was succeeded by
Pelham; Ranelagh began to supplant Vauxhall as a
centre of fashion ; and Cowper left Weilminifer. He
went to live with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor of Ely Place,
Holborn, to learn law. But the colouring of his life did
not alter very much. He was a young man, and not a

31 Life oj C(mper

boy: he used to drink port with his friends, dressed
in small clothes in the evening by way of recreation,
in^ead of eating blackberries with them, dressed in
jackets in the afternoon; and he worked when he
liked. But the friends themselves and the subje^s
they talked about were the same as at We^fmincer.
Cowper was not the sort of character that sows wild
oats. Apart from his natural sobriety, his mind con¬
tinued absorbed by the subjefts which had occupied
moA of its attention at school. He was a scholar;
and that is to say that his school work was the beginning
of the work he did when he grew up, not a prepara¬
tion for it. He estimated a man’s ability by his
schola^ic attainments. Nothing else seemed to him
so worth doing. Law bored him extremely; and he
spent moft of the time he was supposed to be working
at it in writing Latin verses. For the re^ he argued
and laughed with Colman and Thornton and Russell
about Homer and Horace ju^l as he had done at
Weilmin^er. Only now one had delicious conversa¬
tions that could go on as long as one liked and where
one liked, without being called away to go to bed or
to apply one’s mind to some dreary subjeft in which
one took.no interest. He did not only talk about
scholarship. Politics birred him deeply. He had
all the full-blooded eighteenth-century belief in the
superiority of England to every foreign country in
every respeft. And beyond this, he juft liked talking
about the world around him. In this, too, he was of his
period. The men of the eighteenth century always
aspired to be men of the world, reftrifted in its dimen¬
sions though that world might be. It was not then
the mark of a diftinguished man to devote himself
exclusively to one intereft, and count the world well
loft.’ Men of fashion knew about literature; artifts
discussed politics. For, as everybody accepted the
general lines on which society was conftrufted, they

The Stricken Deer 32

would have thought a man eccentric who rejefted any
aftivity that lay within them. But Cowper would
have been interefted in the world around him wherever
he had lived. He was a born friend; always more
interefted in the man he was talking to than in the
subject he was talking about; vigilant to follow his
friend's mood, careless where it led him. And his
interest therefore naturally played round such of his
experience as he and his friends shared together. He
was quick to notice all he saw in their company: the
types and oddities of London; the fops and the
pedants; the feeble young man who was dominated
by his mother; the spoilt child who told tales of the
servants ; or, when he had gone on a visit to the country,
the decaying village churches, whose cracked bells
had ceased to ring; the worldly farmers' wives who
came to church to show off their fine silk clothes. He
began to make new friends. There was a young man
called Thurlow also working with Mr. Chapman.
He was much better at law than Cowper, but very
merry and communicative. Easy-going Mr. Chap¬
man did not bother them much; and they used to
sit for hours, two excited boys in the decorous dress of
1752, discussing books and people and how heSt to
dispose of money in charity; and going off into fits of
laughter and then growing very serious again, while
the evening sky darkened to night behind the worn
traceries of St. Etheldreda’s, Ely Place, and the bending
trees in its churchyard.

But other friendships began to dwindle to a small
place in his thoughts compared with that which grew
up between him and his uncle's family in Southampton
Row. Cowper made and liked men friends : he was
so gregarious and so affeftionate that he made a friend
of an animal if he could not find a human being. But
his natural mi/ieu was a domestic circle. It gave him
what he really cared for in converse with his fellow

33 Lije oj Cowper

creatures : intimacy, the delicious sweetness of mutually
enjoyed pleasures, an interest shared with someone
else, a sorrow sympathized with by someone else, a
joke laughed at with someone else. And it gave these
to him enhanced by a thousand small graces that the
moft afFeftionate man friend could never provide.
Cowper was always happy with women. They liked
his warm heart, his charming interest in little things,
his good sense, his delicate, unremitting care for the
feelings of the individual; while they alone were soft¬
hearted and refined enough never to jar on his sensitive
ta^le. But he did not like meeting them at parties.
He was shy, and liked knowing people well, if he knew
them at all. Nothing else fitted in with all his wants
so well as family life; and it was doubly attraftive to
him as he had never had it except in that remote, sunlit
pa^l when he was happy with his mother. He grew
to love all the little incidents and institutions of that
cheerful, respeftable Southampton Row household:
the little parties, courteous and informal, for a few
friends; the little excursions to the country for a few
weeks; the tea-drinkings and wool-windings and
readings aloud and nicknames; the family jokes
lasting for weeks that he bandied with his cousins.
They were the magnet that drew him to the house.
He was fond of his Uncle Ashley, a little man so like
a mushroom in his big white hat with its yellow
lining. But he was not Harriet or Theodora. Harriet
was the beauty of the family; a very Georgian beauty,
dark-haired, with a blooming complexion, arched
eyebrows and a decided mouth. When Cowper went
to Ranelagh with her, all the young men turned to
look at her. She had the ways of a beauty, too : little
caprices and coquetries; the desire to please; the
confidence that she could do so. And she was clever,
vivacious, and well-read, with a fund of high spirits and
high-spirited humour. Not that she was unconven-

D

The Stricken Deer 34

tional. No, her ideas were those of the sensible,
respedlable society in which she lived, though perhaps
she expressed them with more enthusiasm and force.
She believed in living a decent, reasonable life, not
without the pleasures that a decent, reasonable man
allows himself. She approved of a decent, reasonable
church; took a decent, though less reasonable interest
in the royal family. These are the ideas that emerge
from her well-written, underlined, entertaining letters.
Cowper was very fond of her. How they used to
laugh together 1 How well they understood each other 1
“ So much as I love you,” he wrote to her once, “ I
wonder how the deuce it has happened I was never
in love with you.” It was not really such a wonder as
he said. One cannot be in love with two people at
once; and he was in love with her siSler Theodora.

Compared with her siSler’s vivid and definite, her
personality seems curiously undefined. Her poignant
figure glows through Cowper’s story with a lambent
light of its own; but a tender miSl of love floats
round it, blurring its outlines. Our rare glimpses of
her deteft her in some beautiful attitude of regret or
tenderness; but we cannot distinguish her features.
Through the haze her eyes shine out like Stars; yet we
fail to discern their shape and colour. Perhaps love
inevitably thus cloaks its object. How many of all
4 he love poems that fill the libraries of the world
convey to their readers the impression of a living
individual ? What human being, indeed, can possess
such transcendent qualities as to single them out and
set them above all others ? She is not loved for what
she is, but because for one moment she incarnates to
her lover the essential spirit of beauty, not found on
earth, and partakes of its mystery. The end of that
mystery is the end of love.

It may be that this is why we learn so little of
Theodora from Cowper's poems and letters. And

35 Lije of Cowper

alas, time has silenced her own voice. We have none
of her letters. Her one reported remark is facetious,
but cryptic. Her father asked her what she would
do if she married Cowper. “ Wash all day,” she
replied, “ and ride on the great dog all night.” From
what we can gather, she muit have been vivacious,
like her sifter, enjoying a joke and an argument, able
to treat Cowper with the orthodox caprice of a miftress.
And, more than this, she felt for him a deep and touch¬
ing sentiment. She loved him better than he loved
her. To him she was attractive largely as the ex¬
pression of that gay, secure domefticity which he
desired. When in later life he gave up all idea of this,
he never seems to have thought of her again. But she
did not so easily forget him. She never married;
secretly she followed all the events of his career:
helped to support him, though he never knew it;
and—pathetic illusion—as an old woman mistook a
slight love poem appearing anonymously in the news¬
paper for one of Cowper’s own, and rejoiced to think
that his mind was ^lill constant to that boy-and-girl
romance that had ended nearly forty years before.
However, all that was a long way away. For the
moment Cowper gradually spent more and more of his
time in Southampton Row, till at la^ he only slept at
Mr. Chapman’s. All through the hot July days,
and through those of winter when the windows were
never opened he used to sit with the sifters, and
sometimes Thurlow, “ giggling and making giggle.”
He was gawky and ill-dressed at firft, but Theodora
took him in hand, and improved his clothes and taught
him how to come into a room, and how to talk and
how to walk and how to dance, till, as he said, “ No
dancing bear was so genteel or half so degage**

Whatever his real feeling, he certainly enjoyed being
in love with her; quarrelling with her and making it
up; writing poems and letters to her; thinking of her.

The Stricken Deer 36

When he went to ^ay with his cousins, the Donnes,
in Norfolk, and they drove him about in a whiskum
snivel, he thought of Theodora. When he went out
shooting, the coveys flew over his head unnoticed; he
thought of Theodora. He used to sit with a book on
his knees for hours reading some pages again and again,
and knowing no more about it at the end than at the
beginning; he was thinking of Theodora. “ Let her
say,” he wrote,

“ Let her aay why so fixed and so fteady my look
Without ever regarding the person who spoke,

Still affedling to laugh without hearing the joke;

Or why when with pleasure her praises I hear,

That sweeteft of melodies sure to my ear,

I attend and at once inattentive appear.^'

Meanwhile his time with Mr. Chapman came to an
end. In 1752 he went into residence at the Middle
Temple. And now within a few months a depression
began to overcai^ his spirit. It was partly due to his
age. The poison had always been there. But it had
been counterafted by the routine of school life and the
irresponsibility of youth. He forgot every worry as
quickly as he could; and he had so much to do that
he forgot them very soon. But adolescence breaks
up the whole fabric of habit built up in childhood.
Restlessly one reviews every element of paSl experience.
One muSl understand; one muSt, if possible, assign
each its proper place in the order of life. Even at
twenty-one one tries to co-ordinate the different aspedts
of existence.' One can no longer forget a real
trouble under the spell of a momentary pleasure;
especially if, like Cowper, one is by nature intro¬
spective and dejedted. The melancholy induced by
temperament, increased by early experience, latent
throughout boyhood, beStirred itself and came into the
forefront of his thoughts. J

37 °J Convper

Any natural tendency to depression was increased by
his manner of life. The Temple was a melancholy
place.; It was gay enough on a summer evening, when
the fig trees were in leaf and the leading Counsel were
taking the air, in ruffles and cocked hats, by the side of
the Thames, gleaming in the level rays of the setting
sun,; or in Dr. Johnson’s chambers over the way,
where the pithy, brilliant talk flowed on till the candles
flickered yellow in the pallid dawn. But to Cowper,
who was not a leading Counsel, and did not know Dr.
Johnson, the Temple meant solitude in a dufty set of
chambers up a flight of duftier flairs.

Nor was he, as at school, diftrafted and occupied by
the routine of daily work. In the Temple there was
no routine, and very little work. He was without
briefs; and such work as he chose to do he could
do when he liked and how he liked. None of this
would have mattered if he could have cared for his
profession, if he could have looked on his present inertia
as the inevitable prelude to an absorbing career. But
he had only become a lawyer because his father had
wanted him to; he disliked the subjedf and showed no
talent for it whatsoever. He used to sit through the
long days, with nothing to do but to brood over his
future. How dark it muft have seemed! Cursed
from birth, pursued by misfortune in childhood, he
had now taken up a profession which he hated, and in
which he could not but fail. Yet there was no other
that he liked better; and he was too poor to do nothing
at all. Where was he to look for encouragement ?
To love ? The amiable sentiment he felt for Theodora
was not serious or passionate enough to take him out
of himself. Was it not rather another cause of
trouble ? Physique and poverty alike might prevent
him from marrying her. Nor could the thought of
his friends much console him. What did the moll in¬
timate friend know of the viewless maladies of the soul ?

The Stricken Deer 38

And how could he heal them if he did know of them ?
The very classics loft their power to appeal to Cowper.
He began to hate himself for the value he had set on
these ftony, pagan pages. As the months dragged on
his depression deepened to anguish. With extravagant
self-deprecation he cursed his weakness and incom¬
petence. But his old sense that fate was his enemy
made him hopeless of Curing himself of them. In the
lonely silence of his chambers he cried aloud in his
misery. At laft he turned to religion. It had helped
him once, it might help him again. But religion he
approached shaken by all the terrors of a conscience
that felt he had neglefted it. As he nerved himself to
face a righteous God, his poor, pitiful little sins,
his petty schoolboy lies, the Sundays he had not gone
to church, assumed in his mind the proportions of
great crimes. But God was always merciful; He
cared for the poor in spirit, the failures, those for whom
the world was too hard. Perhaps He would liften to
him if he were sorry for his great sinfulness. He flung
himself upon his knees; but his spirit was too numb
to pray. Like Chriftina Rossetti, he longed for a
heart of flesh inftead of a heart of ftone. He could
not feel; he could only suffer.

One day he picked up a book of George Herbert’s.
The language was " rude and Gothick.” Yet the
spirit of fresh, untroubled piety that arose from the
pages ftole into'his heart, and breathed there the firft
whispers of that spiritual consolation that more direft
methods had been unable to entice. He was ftill in
torture; but these simple verses, like a cold compress
on an aching wound, brought momentary alleviation,
and taught him to hope once more. From them he
learnt of a world innocent and secure, where the light
of faith shone fteadily, unshaken by ftorms; where,
across the little fields, the bells called clearly to church
beneath a serene sky. Herbert taught him that the

39 Lije oj Cowper

^ate of mind he longed to attain was attainable by a
human being. Under his influence he grew more
composed; his heart warmed and softened; he felt
he pould pray once more. For twelve months he lived
in the Temple alone, fleeing the world; ftill convinced
that he was fated to misery, but deriving a little comfort
from a self-appointed r^ginie of devotion; praying,
writing prayers, reading Herbert.

It was an odd life for a young man of twenty-one. A
great deal too odd it seemed to one of his relations who
came to see how he was. With a misunderstanding of
the situation typical of the anxious relative, he attributed
all the trouble to Herbert, and urged Cowper to put
the book away. “ It encourages all that is worSl in
your condition,” he said. In reality it had so far
improved Cowper’s condition that he was able to leave
the Temple to go on a visit to Southampton with a Mr.
Thomas Hesketh, who was engaged to his cousin
Harriet. Cowper’s disguSl with life did not disappear
at once. But insensibly it grew more bearable. For
one thing, he could not feel so gloomy in the country.
His mind was unable to concentrate on its own woe, as
it could in the SlufFy solitudes of the Temple, if he was
out all day rambling on the cliffs or lounging on the
hard sands. He could not lie awake all night in rest¬
less self-torment if he went to bed filled with that
delicious aching lassitude that comes from a day spent
in the open air. And his companions were moSt
tonic in their influence. Mr. Hesketh used to take
“ meo considine,” as he called Cowper, bathing and
sailing. Cowper liked the bathing better than the
sailing. He wore sailor’s trousers and tried to enter
into the spirit of the thing; but he felt cramped.
Still, even this diSlrafted his mind from more ethereal
woes. With Harriet, who joined them, Cowper used
to walk and read and incessantly to talk. His spirits
began to rise. The life which he now led, the pleasant

The Stricken Deer 40

prosaic summer holiday, full of small events and funda¬
mental peace, provided a sort of counter-attack to
his mental terrors. How could he feel that he was the
lonely viftim of an awful fate when he was animatedly
discussing the mo^l agreeable “ scheme ” for passing
the next day with Harriet and Mr. HeskethAnd
as the ordinary daylight of the mental atmosphere
surrounded him, his fears began to appear the insub-
^antial figments of a diseased brain. One day after
he had been in Hampshire for a few weeks a decisive
change came. It was a beautiful cloudless day, and
he had walked out to a hill overlooking the sea. Sud¬
denly, silently, as at the bidding of a divine gesture,
the clouds that had hung over his mind for so long that
they had come to seem an inevitable condition of
exigence rolled away, and the sun shone out in a
clear sky. Sitting there, his cheek caressed by the
salt breeze, and far below him the shimmering sea,
he was overcome with an indescribable sense of peace.
Awful as the period of its dominion had been, his
melancholy had not lafted for ever. It was not
invincible, it could not ultimately ^land between him
and happiness. How could he ever thank the God
who had not left him comfortless ? A gush of intense
emotion, in which exaltation, gratitude and an exquisite
sense of relief mingled like inftruments in an orchestra,
welled up in his heart and filled his eyes with tears.

As the days went on his troubles dwindled to ^lill
smaller proportions in his mind. He felt that they
had been too trivial to be dignified by the name of
spiritual: they were the result of some physical weak¬
ness. Accentuated by his cloi^ered life in the
Temple, they had been banished by a change of air
and scene. If he could lead a more normal exigence,
see more people and have more occupation he could
easily keep them from troubling him. His spirits
rose higher every day. He laughed with Harriet till

41 Life of Cowper

his sides ached; and after a few cheerful months drove
back to London, burnt the prayers he had written, and
sallied out to find his friends.

The fit was pail. Once again, as at school, the
vitality of youth had routed the shadowy battalions
of his nervous fears. And he now hoped that by
resolutely averting his mind from such subjefts he
could keep them at bay for ever. Sometimes when
he was alone in his chambers dark thoughts would
begin to ileal back into his mind. Hurriedly he would
take up his pen and paper and begin a letter,

“ ’Tis not that I presume to rob
Thee of thy birthright, gentle Bob, . . .

That I presume to address the muse;

But to divert a fierce banditti
(Sworn foes to everything that’s witty).

That, with a black infernal train,

Make cruel inroads on my brain,

And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense :

The fierce banditti that I mean

Are gloomy thoughts led on by spleen.”

That was what he muft hold on to. His gloomy
thoughts had no rational foundation; they were the
result of spleen.

For the moment this method of dealing with them
was successful enough. The dark mi^s that had
shrouded his spirit were dissipated. Already beside
the sunny realities of his holiday life they had shrunk
to a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. A varied
exigence of work and play, with no time left for moping,
would surely make them vanish altogether. Perhaps
after a few busy, happy, normal years he would look
back on his troubles of 1751 as a trivial green sickness
of nerves, such as any young man might pass through
in the difficult fir^l years of maturity. Perhaps-

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST COLLAPSE, I762-I764

September 2 nd, 1762.

“Your letter has taken me ju^l in the crisis; to-morrow
I set off for Brighthelm^one, and there I ftay till work
brings all to town again. The world is a shabby
fellow and uses us ill: but a few years hence there will
be no difference between us and our fathers of the
tenth generation upwards. I could be as splenetic
as you, and with more reason . . . but my resolution
is never to be melancholic while I have a 4100 in the
world to keep up my spirits. God knows how long
that will be, but in the meantime 10 Triumphel If
a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble
objeft, a little one who despises them is no contemptible
oneand that is all the philosophy I have in the world
at present. . . . Did you ever know a man who was
guided in the general course of his actions by anything
but his natural temper ? And yet we blame each
other's condudl as freely as if that temper was the
moSt tradable bead in the world, and we had nothing
to do but to twitch the rein to the right or the left. . . .
This is a drange epidle, nor can I imagine how the
devil I came to write it; but here it is, such as it is,
and much good may you do with it. I have no edate,
as it happens, so if it should fall into bad hands I shall
be in no danger of a commission of lunacy. Adieu.

“ Yours ever,

“ William Cowper.”

4 *

43 Life oj Cowper

The Cowper who sat writing these words to his
friend Clotworthy Rowley was now thirty-one. With
the passage of time his features had set: the mould of
the big nose and the fine lips was now defined; little
lines of laughter had drawn themselves at the corner
of mouth and eyes. But otherwise he and his situation
had altered little. He was ^lill in the Temple, ^fill
without briefs, ^lill as far from real peace of mind as
before. Indeed, Clotworthy Rowley, or anyone else
who cared to read between the lines of this letter of
September, could see that it was written by a man who,
for all his boated ftoicism, was profoundly discouraged
about life. Of course he was never likely to shake
himself free from a conftitutional depression by simply
refusing to think about it; for that method left the
roots of his melancholy untouched. He was ftill
afraid of it. Occupy himself as he might, he could
not rid himself of the unspoken convi<flion that he was
diverting his mind from a dark tangle of horrible
shadows, which he mu^l not think of left it should make
him mad. And his fears were ftill myfterious fears.
He had never had the courage to turn them out and
examine them in the light of day: so he had never
been able to reconftruft his scheme of exiftence to
include and control them. They remained anomalous
to it, a nameless blackness whose origin he had not
traced and whose powers he could not gauge. As long
as they kept quiet he was happy enough; but if they
became aftive he underftood them too little and feared
them too much to do anything but succumb. Yet
they would only keep quiet as long as his life was un¬
troubled. For as he had made no rational attempt
to discover their true ftrength, his only weapon
a^ainft them was to maintain a cheerful vigour—
vigour in the light of which mental terrors appeared
trivial and without subftancc. To a temperament
like Cowper’s such a mood was only possible as

The Stricken Deer

44

long as his horizon was unclouded. But the per-
speAive of his paA life down which he gazed as
he leant back in his armchair in the Temple room
was a grey one, undi^urbed by any shattering grief,
but unillumined by any lading joy—an image of
failure, of vacuity, of the sad, futile fleetingness of
human life.

In 1756 he loft his father, and with him the laft link
that bound him to his happy childhood, to his mother
and the green meadows of Berkhamfted. He went
down to the funeral. “ Then, and not till then,” he
wrote, “ I felt for the firft time that I and my native
place were disunited for ever. I sighed a long adieu
to fields and woods from which I once thought I should
never be parted, and was never so sensible of their
beauties as when I left them all behind me to return
no more." He had loft Theodora. The long court¬
ship had dragged on two years, three years, four years,
and at the end her father, for reasons of health or of
money, had said that it could not be. Perhaps they
had never expefted it would come to anything. But
it had been a delicious dream while it lafted. Now the
dream was broken, and it seemed to Cowper that he
muft forever climb life’s rough path alone. He had
loved her, and she had adored him; but their
ftars were contrary; and they muft part. And with
Theodora went the chief charm of that sunny life in
Southampton Row which had proved itself so fturdy a
bulwark againft his melancholy. He turned more
and more to his men friends. Within a year Russell,
closeft of all since Weftminfter days, was accidentally
drowned. This third blow ftruck Cowper hard.
Friendship without intimacy meant nothing to him;
and it seemed as if fate was determined to deprive
him of all those with whom he was intimate. He
became moody and silent, and unable to talk in
company.

45 Lije oj Cowper

“ Doomed as I am in solitude,” he wrote to Harriet
Hesketh, ” To wafte

The present moment and regret the paft
Deprived of every joy I value moft,

My friend torn from me and my miftress loft:

Call not this gloom I wear, this anxious mien,

The dull effeft of humour or of spleen.

Still, ftill I mourn with each returning day
Him snatched by fate in early youth away
And her through tedious years of doubt and pain
Fixed in her choice and faithful—but in vain.”

That was five years ago now, and time had a little
dulled the edge of his grief. But he had never alto¬
gether recovered his spirits; and lately a more mundane
trouble had begun to diilurb him. Cowper had never
been rich; now he was becoming poorer. And poverty,
though it may not be so desolating at any given
moment as the loss of friends, is more persistently
worrying to the nerves. It shuts one in on every side.
If Cowper felt downcaSl he could not go abroad or keep
open house at home. He was not rich enough. But
the difficulties imposed by having little money now
were nothing compared to those raised by having less
in the future. He was not luxurious, and, like all
timid people, he could easily learn to put up with any
sort of life if he felt it to be safe and certain. But he
was proportionately more upset by not knowing what
was going to happen to him. He muSl find some
way of increasing his income. But what ? He had
been a failure as a lawyer. He loathed it, and had
never tried to work at it properly. Perhaps if he
made an effort now—but at the thought a sort of
impotence seized him. The more important he felt it
to be that he should work, the less he seemed able to do
it. He had followed the idle bendings of his inclination
so long, had become such a slave to chance desire, that
he could not make himself work regularly—especially

The Stricken Deer 46

if it was at something he disliked. Indeed, though he
did not realize it, lack of regular work was one of the
subtle^ causes of his depression.

If you are working hard all day at a given task you
cannot become the vi<ftim of your own moods. You
are juft part of a machine; and if you are to perform
your funftion properly you muft attend to it, and not
to your ov;n mental condition. This forcible diversion
from your own thoughts saves you from succumbing to
them : it clamps you to reality. But if, like Cowper,
you have no regular work, you judge the value of all
you do or see by what you feel about it. Nothing has
any objeftive value, outside the emotional response it
rouses in you. And as the same emotional response
can never be aroused for long by the same ftimulus,
nothing seems to have a conftant, solid value on which
you can rely. Life flits by you without purpose or
arrangement: like a series of airy piftures, that muft
not be looked at too closely left they should fade.

And without regular occupation the will, too, ceases
to funftion. You lose the habit of making yourself do
something at a definite time, with the consequence that
when an occasion arises when it is necessary to aft at
once, the spring of aftion is rufty and will not move.
Cowper simply was not able to work at law. But he
felt he was getting too old for anything else. And
this refleftion merged in a more general and a more
fundamental melancholy, born of the flight of youth.
Youth cannot take a consiftently pessimiftic view of its
lot; for it thinks of its mode of exiftence, not as real
life, but as the preparation for it. So that, however
much it may deplore the present, it is hopeful about
the future, which muft be different, and will probably
be pleasanter. But with maturity hope begins to flag.
One has grown up and settled to a profession and made
one’s friends, and the course one’s life will wend is clear
before one. If one is ftill weighed down by the burdens

47 oj Cowper

of youth, it seems likely that one will carry them to the
grave. Cowper was now thirty-one; he had been
ten years a member of his profession. And he had as
much experience as falls to many men in their whole
lifetime. He had lived in a great* capital, he had made
many friends, he was a scholar, he had loved. But he
had found no lasting source of happiness, and the lack
of confidence that had tormented him in youth was as
strong at thirty-one as at twenty-one.

Nor could he hope to throw it off as he had hoped
then. When he had come back to London in 1754,
in high feather at recovering from his firft fit of despair,
he had thrown himself into a thousand aftivities:
written poems, pamphlets, political ballads ; founded a
dining club, the “ Nonsense Club ; contributed to a
magazine, the Connoisseur. How his heart had swelled
when Wolfe took Quebec! How it had beaten with
admiration and excitement when he firil read Sir
Charles Grandison 1 But now his interest in books,
in social life, in political events seemed nothing but a
vain attempt to fill a life essentially futile and void.
They moved him when they were new and he was
young ; but in the clear, sunless light of advancing age
he began to see how little real hold they had on him.
His youth was over, and he had done nothing. He
began to wonder if he ever would. One evening,
drinking tea with Thurlow, now a successful lawyer,
he suddenly exclaimed, “ Thurlow, I’m nobody, and I
shall always be nobody, and you will be Lord Chan¬
cellor.” He loathed himself for his ineffeftiveness.
And yet he could not feel he was really to blame. He
had tried to do what he thought right as hard as moft
men he knew. But Fate had been againft him. It was
a thought that struck a responsive chord in the deeped
fibres of his nature. His old diftruft of destiny revived
with a doubled and compelling force. It had never
been wholly latent. At twenty-one, in the fir^l rosy

The Stricken Deer 48

dawn of his love for Theodora, he could write to
her

“ Fated to ills beyond redress,
We must endure our woe;
The days allowed us to possess
’Tis madness to forego.”

And his experience since then had confirmed his
gloomie^ forebodings. One by one the objefts on
which he had set his affedions had borne sad witness to
the nature of their mortality. His mother was dead,
Russell was dead, his home was sold, Theodora lo^l to
him for ever, and youth itself was passing. Nor were
his present prospers brighter. He was poor,, and
seemed likely to become poorer; he had failed in his
profession; yet he felt incapable of making an effort
at that or anything else. Fate had dogged his footfteps
with disafter. Fate had created him powerless to drive
it away.

He should, as in 1752, have sought consolation in
his religion. But, unluckily, religion had become
nothing but an added sort of discomfort to him. As
at school, he felt that he did not live up to it
sufficiently to be rewarded for it. If Chriftian doftrine
was true, then in order to be saved one ought to dedicate
oneself to the Chri^ian life. But he lived a life which,
though not vicious, was solely concerned with the am¬
bitions and pleasures of the world. Nor did he feel
equal to changing it now. In spite of his theoretical
acceptance of orthodox Christianity, it had not since
1752 been able to raise the feebleSl spark of response
in his emotions. He made the wor« of both worlds.
He passionately wished religion to be true, as only
by its help could he extricate himself from the ruth¬
less mechanism of nature. But if it was true, then
his neglect of its precepts was in a fair way to lead him
to eternal perdition. Noisily and persistently, almoSl

49 9 f Cowper

as if he wished to persuade himself that he was as
sure of them as he said he was, he would assert his
beliefs amid companions infefted with the scepticism
fashionable among intelleftual young men of the
period. One evening when he had defended the austere
tenets of the Church till late into the night over
the guttering candles and the wine-ilained cloth,
the man he was addressing said with a note of
asperity, “ Well, if what you say is true, you are
damned by your own showing/’ At these words an
access of self-loathing swept over him. What a con¬
temptible creature he wasl Unable to do right, able
only to talk about it, and to render his views ridiculous
by his inability to a6l on them. God Himself had
called him, yet he could not tear himself away from
pleasures he did not really enjoy to follow the call.

As he ruthlessly scanned his life, his self-disguft
attached itself not to spiritual shortcomings alone; it
merged into a general revulsion from his whole moral
character. Had he been a professing hedonift he
would not have been so unhappy. His life, though
confined, was peaceful: he could enjoy the passing
hour, and wander at his will. Indeed, his nerves were
too fragile to ^and a career of ftrenuous well-doing.
But the Puritan ideas among which he had grown up,
and to which, it mu^l be admitted, he had taken only
too readily, taught him that no moment of one’s
existence is justified unless it furthers a moral purpose.
His moral ideals were too high for his nervous system ;
with the consequence that he lived in a ^late of war with
his own nature, disapproving of it as it was, but was
without power or inclination to turn it into what he
thought It ought to be.

If he could only have faith, if he could be aftively
convinced of the truth of the Gospel, he felt he might
be able to change his life. But at the thought of
making any effort to induce faith, his diilruft of deftiny
£

The Stricken Deer

5 °

crept in and blighted his spiritual, as it had blighted
his material hopes. Perhaps he was doomed not to
believe. Fate was against him in this world : would
not Fate be against him in the next } He brushed
the idea aside, but it had made religion a painful
subjeft to him. Like his paft and his future and his
own charadler, it was one of those things he mu^ try
not to think about.

It is over religion, above all, that people nowadays so
often fail to understand a paSl age. Their historical
imagination fails them. They cannot, as it were, fit
the religious pieces into the reSt of the evidence about
an historical character so as to make up a convincing
human being. Cowper’s religious ideas seem to them
incongruous both with the period he lived in and with
the other sides of his own personality. His letters,
were they not so well written, might be written to-day.
They reveal a character as educated, as sensitive, and
as complex as our own. We do not feel, as we do when
we open a mediaeval, or even a Renaissance book, that
we have left the ordinary daylight of modern life for
another atmosphere, alien, crude and mySlerious. Yet
suddenly Cowper will make a remark revealing that
in some respefts his ideas are those of the Middle Ages,
literal, limited, anthropomorphic. He sees nothing im¬
probable in prophetic dreams and special providences;
he b^elieves he is deliberately pursued by a conscious
and malevolent fate.

But human beings were quite as consilient then, as
they are now. It is ju^l in their attitude towards such
subjects that the difference between them and us lies^
Their view of the physical world was ftill that held ii^
the Middle Ages. They believed in a fixed order of
the universe. Theifts and atheiils alike thought that
the world and everything in it was originally created
exactly the same as it is now, except in so far as the
conscious reason of man has impelled him to alter it.

51 Lije oj Cowper

If this were generally assumed, their very rationalism
would lead them to think that such a complex scheme
of things muil be the deliberate creation or a conscious
Will. And if every individual man is the result of an
aft of conscious Will, it seems likely that that Will will
continue to follow and control his deftiny.

But since the eighteenth century the developments
of natural science have completely altered that con¬
ception of the nature of the universe which, vague and
unqueftioned, underlies the ideas of the average person.
The earth is conceived of as a minute atom, among
millions of other atoms, evolving from no one knows
what, in a manner no one knows how, and in a direftion
no one knows whither; while man himself, sadly
fallen from his former dignity, is become merely an
animal, like other animals, a late, haphazard, and
ephemeral development of some automatic principle of
life unknown. The consequence is that religious ideas
are now confined to religion. His reason working on
his usual assumptions about life no longer leads a man
to search for a religious explanation of any phenomenon
he does not underftand. But it did in the eighteenth
century. The visitation of God seemed to him the
moft probable explanation of an epidemic, as defeftive
sanitation might seem the moft probable explanation
to us. A hundred and fifty years ago even those who
rejefted Chriftianity believed in a firft cause. Voltaire
himself would have been surprised at some of the
views held by an orthodox clergyman of the Church of
England in 1929. Cowper's conviftion of God’s
personal interest in him, and his fears of immediate
damnation if he disregarded it, may have been
morbid, but they were not unreasonable. And they
were perfeftly consiftent with the conception of the
Cosmos held by everyone of his day.

With the failure of religion the laft solid ground
between him and disillusionment split and subsided.

The Stricken Deer 52

Whichever way he looked he saw no liable fa£l or idea
to which he could pin his hopes or on which he could
build his life. Love, youth, friendship, the things of
the mind, the things of the body, they all passed.
Nothing was constant but his disillusionment and the
dim fears that for ever prowled in the background of his
consciousness. For experience that had destroyed his
belief in the reality of everything else had left these
untouched. Indeed, it had laid him more open to
their attack. He could no longer restore his inner life
to its true proportion in the scheme of things by
comparing it to the world outside. For in his’present
mood he could no more use the world outside as a
ftandard by which to measure the reality of his inner
experience than he could use a cloud as a Aandard to
measure the size of a building. He believed in the
actuality of nothing but himself, the secret drama of
his own soul; and about that nothing could seem
incredible.

He was not acutely miserable, but he was without a
moment of genuine happiness. Sometimes for a short
time, as he sat at his open window and watched the
branches feathery again^ the sky and likened to the
water splashing and gurgling from the pumps in the
court below, he could fancy he was in the country,
and be for a little soothed. But when he turned back
into his dingy room, the dreary realities of life would
sweep back into his mind again, all the more painful for
his moment of forgetfulness. He used to try to
comfort himself with trite maxims : “ Never despair,”
“The beft way to meet misfortune is to scorn it.”
But he did not believe them: and he knew he did
not. Was he not painfully aware that the only ftrong
feeling left in him was superstitious fear of the future ?
The army of his thoughts Kept a semblance of marching
ocder. But their morale was gone. At any shock they
would become a rout.

53

Life of Cowper

Such, as far as we can judge, were the main fafts of
his mental condition at thirty-one. And they muft
be kept in mind if we are to have any under^anding
of the terrible, the momentous events that followed.
Cowper had reached the turning-point of his life. In a
short ten months his personality was to undergo a
change only less catastrophic than death. The nervous,
scholarly barrister of the Temple was to die in a lurid
agony of despair and madness, and be born anew in
another place, Stripped of worldljr possessions and
worldly interests, but Strong, single-minded a'nd
sustained by inspiration from an unseen world. This
is the fadt, the aStounding, terrific fa6t. But the
process of its accomplishment is mySterious. Tracing
a man’s hiStory through the records time and chance
have left to us is like reading a novel from which
important pages have been torn out at random.
Charadters appear in the front of the Stage; clearly
they are to play some significant part in the Story; but
the next pages are missing, and when we take up the
tale again these characters have left it for ever. A few
years pass blank and unmentioned. Suddenly a
orilliant light is turned on to the scene. We see the
chief persons at a crucial moment in their lives: every
detail of their every day is revealed with the graphic
meticulousness of truth. But before we have realized
the full purport of the drama the light is withdrawn as
suddenly as it appeared, and we see no more. In vain
we scan the imperfedl records left to us in an effort
to underhand the real origin of Cowper’s catastrophe :
the slim volume of confessions he wrote when he
recovered; a few chance references in later letters;
a handful of gossip collected from contemporaries by
his firSt biographers. But though some episodes are
lit up in vivid detail, though the myStery is chequered
by many gleams, clues to revelation, we never see the
event in the round, are never certain that we have had

The Stricken Deer

54

a full view of all its features. We mu^ guess, draw
our' conclusions, put two and two together, if our
portrait of Cowper is to have that completeness which
IS as necessary to history as to other arts. But it is a
difficult task: much of the evidence makes the event not
less, but more my^erious. The ostensible causes
seem so much too slight to have produced so great a
catastrophe. It is here that a realization of Cowper’s
nervous condition helps us. This condition was
already such as to make some cataStrophe inevitable.
As we have seen, any shock would be enough to upset
him altogether; and it was impossible that he should
live an ordinary life in an ordinary world without
experiencing some sort of shock some time. His
inner life was now his only Standard of reality, so the
moSt severe shock would be one that Stirred up his inner
fears. And thus it might well be given by some event
that will appear trivial to the outside observer.

It was, m fa( 5 t, given by an effort to relieve the moSt
pressing of his cares. By the convenient syStem of
Government appointment prevalent in the eighteenth
century, his cousin. Major Cowper, had the right to
present to the poSl of Clerkships of the House of Lords
and to those or Reading Clerk and Clerk of Committees
to the House of Commons; and he had always
promised to offer one or more of them to Cowper. This
promise had been Cowper’s one hope of improving his
financial position, and he had often laughingly lamented
the long life of their present occupants, and said how
he wished they would die. Now at lail one of them
did; while soon after, the other two resigned. And
one February morning his cousin arrived in Coiner’s
chambers, offered him both the Clerkship of Com¬
mittees and the Reading Clerkship, the two moft
lucrative of all the po^s within his presentation. It
was the end of Cowper’s financial troubles; and it
should have awakened a glow of happiness in his

55 of Cowper

heart. But, ^rangely, it did not. He returned to his
rooms filled with a sense of anti-climax, of doubt,
even of depression. A thousand difficulties began to
trouble his mind. What would be expefted of him
in his new occupation ? Would he be equal to it ?
Did he deserve it ? And here his conscience, inflamed
by years of introspeftion, began to worry him. He
remembered that he had wished for the poor Clerk’s
death in order that he might take his place: and now
he had died, and he was going to. He felt that
he was no better than a murderer. No good could
come of an advantage gained in such circumstances.
He longed to ask his cousin for the House of Lords
Clerkship inSlead of the other two, even though it was
worth less. But this idea brought its attendant
anxiety. If he took the less lucrative poSt, people
might accuse his cousin of keeping the others back in
order to Sell them to the higheSl bidder : he would be
injuring his own benefaftor. In spite of this, after
some weeks of painful indecision he made up his mind
to ask him. But though Major Cowper lived juSl over
the way, Cowper did not go to see him, but wrote him
a long letter explaining what he wanted. It was
granted. And for a moment Cowper felt relieved,
even hopeful. It was not for long. The anxiety he
had experienced was far too unreasonable to be Stilled
by the mere removal of its occasion. The conscience
that made itself guilty of the Clerk’s death, the Slate of
mind that led him to compose an elaborate letter to a
relation living next door, were not likely to leave their
possessor long at reSl, After tjie firft sensation of
relief had worn off Cowper began to grow as anxious
about his new poSl as he had been about his old.

And, unlucky day, circumSlances now arose which
gave him a legitimate cause for anxiety. The Clerk¬
ship of the House of Lords had especially attracted
Cowper, as he could take it up without passing a public

The Stricken Deer 56

teft or in any way exhibiting his shrinking figure before
the eyes of Grangers. But in the summer of 1763
he was horror-^lruck to hear rumours that a party
ho^ile to his family connexion was forming again^
them, and was ready to go to any length to get the
Cowper nominee rejefted. The rumour proved true,
and the intrigues of this myfterious party succeeded in
persuading whatever authority decided such things to
decree that the candidates for the Clerkship must pass
a public examination. Picture Cowper’s horror. He
had always been agonizingly shy in public, and now if
he was to retrieve his fallen fortunes and be a credit to
his benefaftor he muft ftand up and submit to a viva
voce examination by the whole House of Lords:
a House of Lords many of whose members would be
trying to trip him up in favour of another candidate.
All the chords of his nervous sy^em, already Wretched
to breaking-point during the la^l few years, were set
trembling and vibrating. His fatalism convinced him
he would fail; his inability to work stopped him from
acquiring the information required to prevent him
failing; his horror of the unknown conjured up a
thousand new obstacles which the opposing party might
put in his way; while the fear or persecution, latent
m him since Market Street, filled nim with panic at
the very fail of opposition. He had little reason to
feel it. He would have to prove utterly ignorant before
his cousin’s choice could be quashed, and it would be
quite easy for any man of sense to learn what was
required in five months. But Cowper was no longer
a man of sense. He could not sleep, he could not
think, he could not work. The journal books in
which he was to be examined were thrown open to
him, and every day he went down to the office to read
them. The clerks there were in his opponents’
intere^, and did nothing to help him ; but he was far
too agitated to have profited by their help had they

57 Lift of Cowper

been willing to offer it. His pulse beating in his ears,
his head heavy like lead, he read and re-read the same
page without underAanding a word of it. Every
morning when he arrived at the office he said he “ had
all the sensations of a criminal arriving at the foot of
the scaffold.” And every morning that passed was a
morning nearer the examination.

At laft, after three months, remembering his expe¬
rience of 1752, he decided to try a change of scene,
and went to Margate for August and September. For
the time being it certainly did do him good. He was
practised at putting aside unpleasant thoughts by now,
if he was helped by any sort of diitradtion. As he lay
on the sand, watching the irregular line of wave break
sparkling, and recede, and break again, as far as eye
could reach, his troubled spirit sank into a kind of
tranquillity. A mift rose up between him and London.
With a heart nominally at peace he lounged on the
beach, and walked amid the false Gothic ruins,
lancet window and chantry chapel open to the sky,
which Lord Holland had ere«ed m the dells of
Sandgate Park*, absurd caftle of Udolpho, where
perhaps Charles Fox, a swarthy boy of fifteen, was
rambling at the same time—Charles Fox reckless and
high-hearted ; Cowper expectant only of despair.

But his outward agitation alone was billed: the
trouble that caused it was ^lill as formidable to him as
before. Though he could put them behind him as
long as he was occupied, his sleep was disturbed by bad
dreams. And when he woke in the morning and his
vitality was low, and there was nothing to come between
him- and his fears, he was in anguish. “ I looked
forward to the approaching winter,” he says, “ and
regretted the flight of every moment which brought it
nearer; like a man borne away by a rapid torrent into
a ftormy sea where he sees no possibility of returning
and where he sees he cannot submit.”

The Stricken Deer

58

How little good Margate had done him became
clear the moment he got back to London. When he
returned to his work at the House of Lords Office all
his old agitation came back, rendered worse by the
consciousness that he had tried the only remedy he
knew of, and that it had been found wanting. He was
in a trap. If he went through with his ordeal he muft
be publicly humiliated; if he gave it up he would
injure a benefactor to whom he owed every gratitude.
And a failure in loyalty and affeCtion was especially
hateful to him. He felt he would never be able to go
through the examination ; and yet how decently could
he get out of it i Alone in the maddening silence of
his chambers, his mind turned round upon itself like
a squirrel in a cage.

From henceforward the ^lory is clouded by the
smoke, diftorted by the lurid light of madness.
Horrible hints reach us as to the nature of the fears that
tormented him. In the hurricane that was sweeping
over him the depths of his personality was ftirred up
and obscene monilers that had slept there for years
came to the surface. He believed, it is said, that his
enemies had discovered his secret deformity and were
threatening to expose it. It is an unlikely ilory. How
could it help them } Why should such a deformity

C svent a man being made Clerk of the House of
rds } On the other hand, there may well have been
a more intimate reason for such a catailrophe as over¬
took him than the mere fear of making an exhibition
of himself. And if it is true he was deformed it is
possible that, already suffering from some kind of
persecution mania, he now associated it with the
shameful secret which had done so much to infeft
him with his fundamental diftruil of life.

In his despair he cut himself off from his friends.
Aloud in his solitary chambers he cursed the hour of his
birth. If he was weak, he was no worse than many

59 Lije oj Cmvper

other men. He had tried to be good. What had he
done to deserve this frightful crucifixion ? To ease
his pain he began taking drugs. But they only
numbed, they did not remove it. And such comfort
as they gave was neutralized by the awful awakening,
when he looked out wretchedly into the dawn, livid
over the Temple roofs, and realized that the relief of
the night before had been an illusion.

Once more he turned to prayer. But it was as the
lail resort of an anguished soul, not as the result of
any religious impulse. And the spirit which had
been rendered incapable of prayer by the youthful
melancholy of 17 54 was now far beyond concentra¬
tion on any world but its own. He soon gave up the
attempt.

Physical and spiritual remedies had both failed him.
And every day the thought of his examination grew
more intolerable. He would never be able to face it,
never, never. He would go mad firft. And he only
hoped madness would come as soon as possible. But
day followed day, each more swiftly than the laft;
and he remained horribly sane, his mind working with
exquisite clearness; his sensibilities sharpened to the
finest point; his eyes fixed, open and fascinated, upon
the doom that was advancing on him. God was even
going to refuse him the terrible mercy of madness:
he muft drink his bitter cup. But he could not, he
would not. And now the idea of suicide began to ^eal
into his thoughts. Death, which had thrown a faint,
persistent shadow over his whole outlook on existence
ever since he had firSt realized it in St. Margaret’s
churchyard twenty years before, now appeared infinitely
desirable, a cool dark pool of refuge where he might
reSl in peace his bruised and burning spirit. The
God of his faith had indeed forbidden a man to kill
himself. But Cowper’s faith had been too much a
thing of words, the result rather of a will to believe than

The Stricken Deer

6o

of a genuine convi£fion, to influence his actions in such
a crisis. Maybe there was no God. If there was, no
hell to which He could consign him could be worse
than his present life. But what did he know of God ?
Perhaps He did not condemn suicide. The great men
of antiquity, the idols of that classical scholarship by
which all Cowper’s young ideas had been moulded,
had all praised, and some of them committed, it.
Why, his own father had not thought it wrong. He
remembered well a curious occasion about eighteen
years before when his father asked him his opinion on
the subjeft. He had ardently declared again^ it, but
liis father had looked at him with a Grange expression,
and had not applauded what he said. The real reason
for this had been that an old friend of Mr. Cowper’s
had ju^ killed himself, and he did not wish to speak
harshly of him. But young Cowper had not known
this; and the incident ftuck in nis mind, and now
exercised a powerful effeft on his judgment. For he
had become so obsessed by one idea that he saw the
re^l of existence only in relation to it, and its incidents
only as arguments for and againft self-murder. The
slightest faft or the lighteil word was to him an
indication of that fate predefined for him in heaven,
and againf which it was useless for him to f ruggle.

One evening, at a coffee-house, a gentleman entered
into conversation with him and, f rangely enough, the
conversation turned on suicide. Stranger fill, the
gentleman, a respef able elderly man, advocated it.
Another day, at the little chop-house near the Temple
where Cowper took mof of his meals, a f ranger began
to talk to him, and again argued f rongly in favour of
suicide. It seemed as if he were being direfly pointed
to it by some higher power. It could not be by the
God of his childhood. But Cowper’s very atheism was
superfitious. He was so religious by temperament
that if he forswore a Chrif ian Providence, it was only

6i

Life of Cowper

to dire£l his life in accordance with the di^lates of some
dark amoral totem of his imagination.

These two conversations finally decided him; and
one dark evening he went into a chemist’s, and in a
voice as natural and unconcerned as he was able to
muiler, asked for laudanum. The chemiil looked at
him curiously, appeared to hesitate for a moment,
and then gave him what he wanted. But there was a
week before his examination, and he shrank from taking
it at once. For seven long days, alone in his chambers,
he waited and waited, his fingers pressed to the cold
laudanum bottle in his pocket, hoping that something
would happen to ^op the examination. But of course
it did not. Two days, three days, four days, five days
passed; and now before the day after to-morrow he
mu^ choose between death and humiliation. At
eight o’clock he woke, threw on his clothes, and
dragged himself to Richard’s coffee-house to get some
breakfast. He picked up a newspaper. The firft
thing on which his eyes refted was a letter advocating
suicide. This laft touch was too much for his already
tottering self-control. It seemed to him that the
author mu^ have known of his case and was writing
about it. Crying out, “ Your cruelty shall be gratified,
you shall have your revenge,” he rushed from the room.
He meant to go to the deserted fields that lay round
London in order to put an end to himself in some ditch.
But before he had gone far his mind began to waver.
There was no necessity for him to die. He could sell
what he had in the funds in a few hours and take a boat
for France, there become a Roman Catholic and, cut¬
ting himself absolutely off from England, pass the reil
of his life in the cloiftered peace of a monaftery. He
hurried back to his chambers to pack; but he had
hardly got back when his mind underwent a reaction.
His thoughts fell back into their former proportion and
he felt that only death could assure him of peace. It

The Stricken Deer

62

could only be cowardice that had flopped him before,
that cowardice which was perhaps the moft hateful
and contemptible of all the weaknesses that had dogged
him throughout his mortal life. He mu^ kill himself
at once. But again a wave of indecision swept over
him. Where should he do it ? He was sure to be
interrupted in his chambers. He made up his mind
to take a coach to Tower Wharf and do it there. But
when he arrived, the firft object he saw was a porter
seated waiting on a pile of goods, as if sent there to
prevent him. He got back into the coach and told the
driver to go back to the Temple. “ I drew up the
shutters,” he writes, “ once more had recourse to the
laudanum and did determine to drink it off diredlly,
but God had otherwise ordained. A conflidl that shook
me to pieces suddenly took place, not properly trem¬
bling, but a convulsive agitation which deprived me in
a manner of the use of my limbs, and my mind was as
much shaken as my body. Diftrafted between the
desire of death and the dread of it, twenty times I had
the phial to my mouth and as often received an irre-
siAible check, and even at, the time it seemed to me
that an invisible hand swayed the bottle downwards.
I well remember that I took notice of this circum-
^ance with some surprise, though it effefted no change
in my purpose. Panting for breath and in a horrible
agony, I flung myself back into the corner of the coach.
A few drops of laudanum, which had touched my lips,
besides the fumes of it, began to have a stupefying
cfFe<fl on me. Regretting the loss of so fair an oppor¬
tunity, yet utterly unable to avail myself of it, I deter¬
mined not to live; and already half dead with anguish,
returned to the Temple. InSlantly I repaired to my
room, and having shut both the inner and the outer
doors, prepared myself for the laSl scene of the tragedy.
I poured the laudanum into a small basin, set it on a
chair by the bedside, half undressed myself, and lay

63 Lije of Cowper

down between the blankets, shuddering with horror
at what I was about to perpetrate—I reproached myself
bitterly with rank cowardice at having suffered the
pain of death to influence me as it had done, but ftill
something seemed to over-rule me and to say ‘ Think
what you are doing, consider and live.' At length,
however, with the mo^l confirmed resolution, I
reached forth my hand towards the basin, when the
fingers of both hands were as closely contracted as if
bound with a cord, and became entirely useless. Still,
indeed, I could have made shift with both hands, dead
and lifeless as they were, to have raised the basin to
my mouth, for my arms were not at all affeCted, but this
new difiiculty struck me with wonder; it had the air
of a divine interposition. I lay down in bed to muse
upon it, and while thus employed heard the key turn
in the outer door, and my laundress’s husband came in.
By this time the use of my fingers was restored to me.
I started up hastily, dressed myself, hid the basin, and
affefting as composed an air as I could, walked out
into the dining-room. In a few minutes I was left
alone. The man had juil shut the door behind him
when a total alteration in my sentiments took place.
The horror of the crime was immediately exhibited to
me in so ftrong a light that, being seized with a kind
of furious indignation, I snatched up the basin, poured
away the laudanum into a phial of foul water, and not
content with that, flung the phial out of the window.
. . . The sense of the enormity of the crime which I
had juil experienced soon entirely left me.”

Day dawned, chill November day; and now there
was only one more night between Cowper and .his
examination. He ftill meant to kill himself, for there
seemed no other way of escape. But the mental
torture which he had undergofte the previous night had
left him for the moment without the power of doing
anything. His mind dazed, his nerves numb, he passed

The Stricken Deer 64

the day in a ftupor of misery. Automatically he got up,
dressed himself, took his meals, went out, came in again.
The sun rose, reached its zenith, declined, set: there
were only twelve hours left. “ That evening a moft
intimate friend called upon me, and felicitated me
upon a happy resolution which he heard I had taken,
to ^and the ijrunt and keep the office. I knew not
whence this intelligence arose, but did not contradict
it. We conversed a while with a real cheerfulness on
his part and an affeClcd one on my own; and when
he left me I said in my heart, ‘ I shall see thee no more.’
I went to bed as I thought to take my laft sleep in this
world. I slept as usual, and woke about three o’clock.
Immediately I arose and, by the help of a rush-light,
found my penknife, took it into bed with me, and lay
with it for some hours, direftly pointed againft my
heart. Twice or thrice I placed it upright under my
left breail, leaning all my weight upon it: but the point
was broken off and would not penetrate. In this
manner the time passed till the day began to break. I
heard the clock ftrike seven, and instantly it occurred
to me there was no time to be loft: the chambers would
soon be opened, and my friend would call upon me to
take me with him to Weftminfter. Now is the time,
thought I, no more dallying with love of life. I arose
and as I thought bolted the inner door of my chambers.
I was miftaken. My touch deceived me, and I left
it as I found it. Not one hesitating thought now
remained, and I fell greedily to the execution of my
purpose. My garter was made of a broad scarlet
binding, with a sliding buckle being sewn together at
the ends: by the help of the buckle I made a noose
and fixed it about my neck, ftraining it so tight that I
hardly left a passage for my breath, or for the blood
to circulate. At each corner of the bed was placed a
wreath of carved work, faftened by an iron pin. The
other part of the garter which made a loop I slipped

65 Lije of Cowper

over one of these and hung by it some seconds, drawing
up my feet under me that they might not touch the
floor; but the iron bent, the carved work slipped off
and the garter with it. I then fastened it round the
frame of the tefter, winding it round and tying it in a
ilrong knot; the frame broke short and let me down
again. The third effort was more likely to succeed.
I set the door open, which reached within a foot of the
ceiling, and by the help of a chair I could command the
top of it, and the loop being large enough to admit a
large angle of the door, was easily fixed so as not to slip
off again. I pushed away the chair with my feet and
hung my full length. While I hung there I diftincftly
heard a voice say three times, ‘ *Tis over.' Though
I am sure of the faft, it did not alarm me. I hung so
long that I loft all sense, all consciousness of exiftence.
When I came to myself again I thought I was in Hell:
the sound of my own dreadful groans was all that I
heard, and a feeling like that of flashes was juft begin¬
ning to seize upon my body. In a few seconds I
found myself fall over with my face to the floor." In
a minute or two he rose, ftumbled across the room and
flung himself on the bed. He did not try to kill
himself again.

Indeed, his attempt had not been very successful.
It was worthy of notice that either his decision weak¬
ened juft when it should have been put into effeft, or
when at laft he was forced to take action he was unable
to carry it through. In later years he put this
sequence of failure down to the hand of God, Who had
always intervened, as he thought, to save him from
committing a mortal sin. But at the bottom his horror
of death was as ftrong as ever, and except in moments
of intenseft agony, when anything seemed preferable
to what he was going through, he never can really
have meant to do it. There was no reason why he
should not have killed himself in his chambers.

F

The Stricken Deer

66

But his whole being revolted from the aft, and he
unconsciously invented some excuse so as not to
have to do it. And at the laft, when he finally decided
on death, his hand faltered. To return to the ftory.
The laundress had heard him fall, and now came in to
see if he had been seized with a sudden fit. “ I sent
her to a friend, to whom I had related the whole affair,
and despatched unto my kinsman at the coffee-house.
As soon as the latter arrived, I pointed to the broken
garter which lay in the middle of the room; and ap¬
prized him also of the attempt I had been making.
His words were, ‘ My dear Mr. Cowper, you terrify
me. To be sure you can’t hold the office at this rate.
Where is the deputation .i* ’ I gave him the key of the
drawers where it was deposited. He took it away
with him, and thus ended all my conneftion with the
Parliament house.”

The fear which had tormented him since July was
removed. But it had provided the single shock needed
to overturn the tottering ftrufture of his nervous
syftem. And once it was overturned the harm was
done. He was deranged; and the removal of any
extraneous cause for his mania only forced him to
search for another in himself. It was not difficult to
find one. As often happens after a great ftrain, he was
seized with a violent revulsion frofn the aft he had tried
to perform. His superftitious terror, his consciousness
of sin, the fear of God’s wrath which had tormented
him since Weftminfter, overwhelmed him as never
before when he thought of the crime he had so nearly
succeeded in committing. And the horror he felt was
even more unbearable than his horror at the prospeft
of examination from the House of Lords. That had
only made him feel that he was predefined to unhappi¬
ness in this world; this shut him oflf from hope in the
next as well. With every advantage of upbringing,
and no real proyocation, he had deliberately tried to

67 Life oj Cowper

commit the heinous sin of self-murder, the sort of sin
he had read about in the lives of great criminals and
shuddered at when a child. Damnation, probable
before, was now certain. He was the deserving objeft
of God’s righteous wrath, a reprobate from whom any
decent man would shrink in disgust.

He began to fancy they did. Roaming wild-eyed
about the Greets, he would sometimes come across an
acquaintance, and it seemed to his suspicious eye that
he was avoiding him; or, if not, he read covert
allusions to his sin into every sentence he spoke. And
as he turned his back surely did he not hear him
break into a peal of mocking laughter. Nor was it only
his acquaintance whom he suspefted. As he likened
to the ragged ballad-singers who filled the streets with
their strident shouting, he began to imagine that they,
too, were speaking of him, that his sin was the chief
among the tales of sordid crime they were crying for
sale. The whole world knew about him, the whole
world was against him, the whole world mocked him.
And he deserved every bit he got.

Sometimes he tried to diftraft himself by reading.
But even the voices of the dead accused him. He
opened Tillotson’s Sermons, to find a reference to the
barren fig-tree. As he read it seemed to him that the
parable muft have been written about him. In his
thirty-three years what had he produced but leaves—
showy, ruilling leaves of good intention, but never the
fruit of works ? And how had he been cursed ?
Another day he picked up a volume of Beaumont and
Fletcher’s plays that was lying on the window-sill.
His eyes wandered over the page and was caught by
the line:

' “ The ju^ice of the gods is in it.”

Surely words so applicable to his own case could not
be there by chance. No; God had ^mned him, and

The Stricken Deer 68

God was announcing it to him through every one of
His created works.

Brooding day after dayon his pa^l existence, gradually
its purport became clear to him. Like the reif of man¬
kind, he had been offered the choice between good and
evil, between the world and God. From childhood he
had chosen the world. But God, in His particular
mercy, had made one laft effort. He had plunged
him in a melancholy when he was twenty-one, had
turned his thoughts to religion, and filled him with the
divine grace. After this supreme favour Cowper had,
with open eyes, returned to wallowing in his mire.
Now he was reaping his punishment. For the la^l
ten years he had been increasingly anxious about his
spiritual condition; but had beaten down his fears.
At la^l, bereft of false consolation, he saw himself as
he was. His la^ ray of hope was dispelled by a
dream. He thought he was standing in the nave of
Westminster Abbey. From within the choir came
the sound of the organ, and the ethereal voices of the
choir-boys uplifted in a hymn. He walked up in
order to join in the service. When he reached the
door of the choir the iron gates were clanged in his
face: and he awoke. Such a dream could only be
a message of his damnation. He muSl drag on
his life, more unbearable than physical torture, till
death should consign him to an eternity compared
with which all pains of present existence would
seem pleasurable. Spasms of terror ran through hint,
so acute that sometimes he could not Stand, but
Staggered about the room like a drunken man; for
a moment he could see nothing but darkness, and
then, as it were, whorls and tongues of leaping
flame.

Seated at that writing-table where in other days he
had penned urbane articles for the papers, playful
letters to Harriet, with trembling hand he now poured

69 Life of Conuper

out in a Grange Sapphic metre the torrent of his
anguish.

“ Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion
Scarce can endure delay of execution,

Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas; more abhorred than he was,

Who for a few pence sold his holy Mailer !

Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the la^l delinquent,

Deems the profane^f.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me,

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter ;

Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot ! encompass’d with a thousand dangers;

Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,

Pm call’d, if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s.

Him the vindi<ftive rod of angry juflice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;

I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.”

The monotonous round of his melancholy was
broken into by his brother, now a Don at Cambridge,
whom he had written to ju^l after he had given up the
idea of suicide. John Cowper had a family likeness
to his brother. He was scholarly and good-natured
and fanciful. But he was saner and sleepier, and his
nerves, though not ftrong, were less drained. Per¬
haps this was owing to his profession. Anxiety is
foreign to the academic life. Pifture the horror of this
placid Don when confronted with a brother, white-
faced and wild-eyed, who before he had time to speak
ushered him with twitching hands into a chair, and
assured him with a flood of incoherent and unconvinc¬
ing detail that he was damned. He settled in London

The Stricken Deer 70

for the time being and devoted himself to trying to cure
his brother. Hour after hour he reasoned with him.
It was no use arguing with a madman. Reasoning
supposes a common basis of argument, and the central
feature of such a madness as Cowper’s is that the viftim
imagines that he is in a different condition from anyone
else, so that no analogy from ordinary life will be true
of his own. Every day his agony of mind increased.
One day he found himself saying, “ Evil, be thou my
good.” He wondered if it was his soul involuntarily
declaring its true nature. He began to set himself
traps to find the way it was tending. He got out of bed
one night and tried to pray; but the words did not
come. He tried to say the Creed to himself; but a
fog seemed to descend upon his memory, and he could
not get beyond the firil clause. This laft experience
was too much for his self-control. His brother
opened the door to find him stretched on the floor
howling with terror. “ Brother,” he gasped, ‘‘ think
of eternity; then think what it is to be damned.”
John Cowper was at his wits’ end as to how to reassure
him. The voice of his decorous academic religion
could never make itself heard amid his brother’s
ravings. Perhaps his cousin, Martin Madan, a
member of the new Evangelical party, would do better.
He di^lruiled what he had heard of his religion;
but he felt he ought to try everything. Martin Madan
arrived, seated himself at Cowper’s bedside, and in a
melodious voice, vibrant with an unque^ioning faith,
assured Cowper of his certain salvation, if he would
repent. Cowper was too dazed to underhand his
words exaftly; but the fire behind them stirred, for the
firil time, a movement of hope within him. “ Ah,” he
sighed, “ if I could only be sure ! ”

A seed had fallen which was to bear fruit later.
But for the moment his soul was too petrified with
suffering to let it sink in. After Madan’s visit he

71 Ltije of Cowper

relapsed into his former gloom. Events now moved
swiftly to their climax. “ Then did the pains of Hell
get hold of nie. A numbness seized the extremities of
my body, my hands and feet became cold and ^iff. A
cold sweat ^ood upon my forehead. My heart seemed
at every pulse to beat its laft. No convifted criminal
ever feared death more, or was more assured of dying.
When I traversed the apartment in the moil horrible
dismay of soul, expecting every moment that the earth
would open and swallow me, my conscience scaring me,
the Avenger of Blood pursuing me, and the City of
Refuge out of reach and out of sight, a ilrange and
horrible darkness fell upon me. If it were possible
that a heavy blow could light on the brain without
touching the skull, such was the sensation I felt. I
clapped my hand to my forehead and cried aloud with
the pain it gave me. At every stroke my thought and
expressions became more wild and incoherent; all that
remained clear was the sense of sin and the expeftation
of punishment.’’ His wish of ten months back was
terribly fulfilled. He was a gibbering, raving maniac.

The next five months passed in an incoherent agony,
firft in London, and then in Dr. Cotton’s Home for
Madmen at St. Alban’s. Harriet Hesketh came to see
him before he left the Temple; but he turned his
face away. He was far paft her homely miniilrations
now. Nor could the jolting journey through the lanes
of Herefordshire rouse him. His whole mind was
dominated by the thought of his damnation; he
believed that God at any moment might ftrike him
dead. And, faced with such a prospeft, the episodes
of outward life passed remote and unnoticed as the
noise of a distant street to a man working in an upper
room. Day after day he lay upon his bed at Dr.
Cotton’s, bound, for fear he should kill himself, with
the words “ I am damned ” repeating themselves in
his head like the insistent tap of a drum. Suddenly

The Stricken Deer 72

their full implication would flash upon him. He felt
the flames licking his feet, he heard the wails of those
who would be his companions for eternity. And then,
the spasm past, he would fall back into a ftupor,
broken only by the incessant reiteration of his
damnation.

The powers of Darkness had beaten him. The
fragile, intricate cocoon of ta^le and habit that he had
so vigilantly spun around himself was Gripped off;
Cowper, the scholar and the friend, with his intimacy
and urbanity and self-re^lraint, was gone; and in his
ilead was only a poor shivering creature bereft even
of reason, forcibly fed, forcibly detained, whimpering
and cowering from the bogies of his imagination. But
it was not the end. For there is in the human spirit
an upward thruil of vitality that can only be defeated
by death. Torn up by the roots, trodden underfoot,
caft upon the duft-heap, the soul will yet, after a little
time, again revive, and Wretch its tendrils upwards,
and put forth leaves to the sunlight. Cowper’s spirit,
so fragile, so tenacious, so bruised, so resilient, once
more began to climb from the abyss into which it had
fallen. But it was led by other lights than those which
had played round the happiness of his earlier years.
The homely serenity of normal every day had failed
him: the ^lory of his life had changed from a Trollopean
comedy of domestic manners to the soul tragedy of a
Do^loieffsky. And he was to rise from hell borne on
the sublime ec^asies of an Alyosha Karamazof.

In the quiet of the country the fury of his despair
died down, and he began to look on his future with a
certain resignation. With a curious revulsion from his
former self-upbraiding, he wished at moments that he
had committed more sins, since, anyway, he was going
to be punished everlaftingly. However, his damnation
did not seem likely to be immediate, so he felt that he
had better make the beil of what time he had left on

73 <lf Confer

earth. The course of his life became more normal.
He began to eat and drink with appetite and to laugh
at kind old Doftor Cotton’s jokes. Winter softened
to spring, spring glowed into summer, and in July his
brother came to see how he was. At fir^l he was dis¬
appointed. William eyed him with dejeftion. After
an awkward pause John asked how he felt; but he
only replied, “ As much better as despair can make me.”
For the la^l time John buril out in proteft; urged,
argued, insifted that it was all a delusion. At these
words William felt the heavy load that had weighed
down his mind so long ^lir in its place. Could his
brother’s words be true } Was it conceivably,
marvellously possible that he should yet live to look
back on all that he had gone through as an unsub¬
stantial nightmare ^ His returning vitality leapt out
to meet the thought. ” Oh,” he cried, and as he spoke
his breath caught in a sob of emotion, “ oh, if this be
a delusion, then am I the happieSl of men !” And he
burSl into tears.

But though his brother’s visit had unsealed the
fountain of his hope, there was as yet no channel
through which the ^ream might flow. He felt ready
for happiness, but he had no intelleftual conviftion with
which to juSlify such a feeling. As he paced the sunlit
garden he trembled with expeftancy; whether of joy
or sorrow he could scarcely tell. But every moment,
and with a growing persistence, something whispered
in his heart that there was mercy for him. His spirits
were further raised by a dream. He thought that a
child about four years old came dancing up to his
bedside, radiant and beautiful as an angel from heaven ;
and that at the sight of it an indescribable sense of peace
and freshness Stole into his heart. He awoke, but the
memory of the dream had spilt a perfume of happiness
over his thoughts, that lingered there all day. Like his
fall, his recovery imaged itself in dreams: flowers of

The Stricken Deer 74

an imagination blossoming in sleep, or intimations
from another world, who can tell ?

A few days later, walking in the garden, he came
upon a Bible lying on a bench. He opened it at the
twelfth chapter of St. John's Gospel, and read the
account of the raising of Lazarus. The beauty and
pathos of the Story moved him profoundly. Could
there be any bottom to the depths of a compassion that
was able to vanquish death itself ? Might it not extend
even to him ? Within a few hours he received his
answer.

“ Having risen with somewhat of a more cheerful
feeling, I repaired to my room, where breakfaft waited
for me. While I sat at table I found the cloud of
horror which had so long hung over me was every
moment passing away. I flung myself into a chair
near the window, and seeing a Bible there, ventured
once more to apply to it for comfort and inftruftion.
The firft verse I saw was the 25th of the III Romans,

‘ Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through
faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the
remission of sins that are passed through the forbear¬
ance of God,’ Immediately I received ftrength to
believe it, and the full beams of the Sun’s righteousness
shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the Atone¬
ment he had made, my pardon sealed in his blood, and
all the fulness and completeness of his juilification.
In a moment I believed and received the Gospel.
Whatever my friend Madan had said to me long
before revived in all its clearness the demonstration
of the spirit and with power. Unless the Almighty
arms had been under me I think I should have died
of gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and
my voice choked with transport, and I could only
look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love
and wonder.”

The fears and pains of his troubled thirty years had

75 Life of Cowfier

fallen off him like rags. Sin and sorrow and dis¬
illusion, madness itself, were nothing and less than
nothing in the transcendent glory of his spiritual
reconciliation. But the supreme moments of religious
ecstasy, like the supreme moments of aefthetic experi¬
ence, are not to be expressed in words. Dante
measured hell and purgatory, described their smaller
detail with a meticulous exaftitude; but when he
reached the final circle of Paradise, and was face to face
with that Divine Spirit by Whose Will the whole
huge system lived and moved and had its being, he was
conscious only of a blinding light.

CHAPTER III

THE EVANGELICAL PHASE

The Evangelical movement ftands out in violent con¬
trail to the prevailing thought of its time—a black,
melodramatic silhouette againil the precise, freshly-
hued colour print of eighteenth-century England,
Where the prevailing thought believed that religious
feeling should be disciplined by common sense or
refined by sensibility, it believed that only at its raweil
and moil violent was it sincere. Where the prevailing
aim was to develop you on every side, the Evangelical
said that all aftivities not diredlly connefted with
religion should be shunned. Where the prevailing
theological opinion emphasized the moral aspefts of
religion, the Evangelical rejedled these as worthless
except in so far as they were signs of a healthy spiritual
condition. For, excluded from other sy^lems of
thought, there poured into the narrow channel of
Evangelicalism all the my^lical and transcendental
emotion of the period.

In its early decades, the Church, tired with two
centuries of religious ftrife, had fallen into a polite
lethargy. Its faults can be, and have been, exagger¬
ated. It was learned, rational and dignified. It did
not, as in earlier times, occupy itself with persecution,
nor, as in modern times, with hyfterical bickering over
trivialities of form and ceremonial. But it removed
religion from common life: it did not touch the heart,
nor gratify the longings of the soul to penetrate
beyond the veil of its mortality. Mankind, however,

76

77 of Covoper

a Granger on the earth, bears these longings Tvithin
him, an integral part of his nature; and if the religious
syftem in which he is educated does not cater for them,
he will change it for one that does. Unsatisfied by
Bishop Berkeley on the one hand and Parson Adams
on the other, the spiritually-minded person turned to
Wesley and Whitefield. Their movement ^farted
about 1730. Moft of its early work was done among
the very poor, and took the form of revivalism, with its
accompanying faults of theatrical emotionalism. The
Church at fir^t looked askance at it; and its fir^l
founders broke with the Church. But the fire of
their spirit gradually permeated all the religious life
of the time: it took firm hold of the middle classes,
and penetrated up into the aristocracy. The more
distressing eccentricities of the early movement were
removed, and by the second half of the century
Methodism, pruned, tamed and polished into Evan¬
gelicalism, was the animating force behind the moSt
active, if not the moSt numerous, party in the Church
of England.

Their religion was an exclusively emotional one.
The movement really came from a sense that the good
life is not merely the fulfilling of an ethical code; but
the achievement of a Slate of mind, that is at its higheSl
a State of religious ecSlasy. And they therefore
evolved a theological syStem according to which the
achievement of this ecSlasy was the only aim of religion.
Mankind, they held, has by its own aft become utterly
depraved, incapable of a good aftion or even of a good
intention. The laws of Divine juSlice demanded that
it should be punished for its wickedness. But God,
by an aft of ineffable love, had Himself borne this
punishment in the person of His Son, so that now the
only thing necessary for a man to be saved was that he
should fully realize this—should, in their phrase,
“ lay hold of his salvation ” and be “ converted.”

The Stricken Deer

78

And they identified this consciousness of conversion
with the supreme moment of religious ecstasy. This
consciousness was the sole teft of religious life. If you
had it, you were saved; but without it a life spent in
good afts was of no avail. For any aft muft neces¬
sarily be that of a child of sin, and therefore evil. Such
a view of life, logically pursued in praftice, would lead
man to do nothing but sit and wait for Heaven to con¬
vert him. But the Evangelicals were no more logical
than other fatalifts. And the end of all their teaching
was that man muft make it the objeft of every aft and
thought to attain conversion, to enter into that small
band whom the Divine love has snatched from the
eternal misery which they deserve.

It is not hard to foresee how such a creed would
apply itself in praftice. Your whole energy is con¬
centrated on achieving the ftate of grace, and main¬
taining yourself in it when you have got there. In so
far as it helps you to do this, an aftivity is good, and
should be encouraged; in so far as it does not, it is bad
and muft be avoided. For, as one of their leading
divines put it, “A man only ftays in the world to do
the work of his Creator, as he might out in the
rain to deliver an important message.” The pleasures
of the world are particularly to be shunned; for, by
presenting you with the image of false good, they
diftraft you from following the true. Nor were
learning and reason much better. They were as much
within the capacity of a child of wrath as of a child of
grace; and encouraged man to forget his incompetence.
To the affliftions of life, on the other hand, the Evan¬
gelicals had less objeftion. For these discouraged man
from looking for happiness in this world. While death
itself, the final disafter, was to them the higheft
blessing; for it took you out of the world altogether.
Such worldly aftivities as he muft take part in should
be made as far as possible to serve some religious

79 Life of Cowper

purpose, and so preserved from that taint of sin which
IS inherent in their nature. If you wrote a letter or
paid a call or read a book, you should do so in such a
manner as might lead other people to grace.

The form of this creed derived diredlly from
sixteenth-century Calvinism. Indeed, the renuncia¬
tion of the world under the impulse of religious
experience is behind all ascetic religions. But such
an impulse generally expresses itself in a corporate
organization. The believers band themselves together
to abandon the normal way of life in order the better
to do the work commanded them by God. But the
ftru£lure of society was too generally accepted in the
early eighteenth century for people to contemplate any
corporate break with it. So, in consequence, all this
volume of lyrical emotion, this fear of hell, this
shuddering horror of sin, this faith that would remove
mountains, expressed itself not in a Theba^d or a
Covenant or a Crusade, but in the ordinary affairs
of conventional life. Instead of commanding their
followers to forsake their family and their business,
and to follow the Cross throughout the world, the
Evangelical preachers had to assure them that family
life and business, carried on in the right spirit, could
be the life of the Cross.

In this incongruous contrail between its motive im¬
pulse and the mode of its expression lies the distinguish¬
ing chara6leriSlic of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism.
In every class of society, in every walk of life, little
centres grew up: dome^ic monasteries, homely out-
poSts of salvation. In nearly every country village
there was one family who had prayers morning and
evening and went to church three times on Sunday;
who read nothing but the Bible and the works of a few
“ experiential ” divines, never wore bright colours,
and moddled their conversation on the precepts of
some preacher, Mr. Venn or Mr. Romaine, whom

8 o

The Stricken Dee^-

they had once “ sat under ”; who collefted money for
foreign missions and distributed trafts; who would
hardly move out of the house on Sunday and would
not dance or play cards on any day of the week at all.
In regiment and on b^ttle^hip, among the Hogarthian
naval and military society of the day, the jolly, brutal
Commodore Trunnions and Captain Plumes, with their
carbuncled faces and brazen voices, their swearing and
wenching and drinking, would suddenly appear a man,
like one of Cromwell’s Ironsides risen from the grave
who never swore or got drunk, who read prayers to hi
men, and who spent such time as he could spare fror
the Stern performance of his duties in religious medita
tion. An uneducated serving-boy would be move
by the Spirit and, to the irritation of his employer;
hold prayer-meetings for his fellow-servants, lik
Humphrey Clinker. A peer of the realm, like Lor*
Dartmouth, would withdraw from rout and racecoure
and dedicate himself to the fulfilment of his moe
serious obligations under the guidance of a “ faithfu”
chaplain. The mixture of religious and conventioial
life extended itself to the way in which the Evangelials
expressed themselves. In their hymns the myfterious
dodirines of atonement and redemption are incon¬
gruously packed into the mild dadlylic metres of
eighteenth-century paSloral and set to the matter-of-
fadl melodies of eighteenth-century ballads. Their
preachers, in well-brushed wig and Geneva gown,
would discourse to a respedlable London congregation
on the wickedness of Sunday travel, in the blooddlained
imagery originally used by some half-naked prophet
to an Oriental tribe among the precipitous cliffs of a
Syrian desert.

This combination of the religious and the con¬
ventional had its defedls. For one thii^ it made
practice often inconsistent with precept. The auSlere
tenets of Calvinism had to be considerably modified

81 Lije qJ Cowper

to suit eighteenth-century cuAom; the rude “ Gothic ”
canvas had to be cut down before it fitted the neat
Adams panel. The middle-class Evangelical could
not feel it wrong to make money, however little one
should enjoy it when it was made; and he would spend
Sunday in proclaiming the vanity of earthly riches, and
weekdays in amassing as much of them as he could.
Nor could he allow his conviction of man’s equality
in sin to imperil the social order. If he and his wife
confessed their abjeCt unworthiness to receive earthly
honours, they did it from a cushioned pew in the front
of the church, while the cook and the foot-boy repeated
the same sentiments from a convenient bench at the
back. These were not the only defeCts of Evangelical¬
ism. Its repudiation of the world cut it off from the
whole sphere of aefthetic achievement. Other religions
have be(]|ueathed us cathedrals; Methodism only
yellow-brick Little Bethels. Its doCIrine of conversion
tended to arrogance. Those who considered them¬
selves converted became too familiar with God, too
contemptuous of man. And its emphasis on the
emotional side of religion often led to false emotional¬
ism; hot-house fruits of the spirit, unCIuous soul-
confessions, luscious mechanical ecifasies.

And of course the Evangelicals were often highly
ridiculous. They had rejefted reason, and reason
soon rejefted them. The Rev. Alfred Hutchinson, a
respe^able divine, carried his belief in verbal inspira¬
tion so far as to hold that Hebrew alone of human
languages had the syntax and grammar competent to
express the mind of God, and that all the possible
discoveries of physical science, myfteriously evaporated
in the process of translation, could be found in the
Bible it read in its original tongue. The Evangelicals
could discern a special providence in the mo^ trivial
occasions. If a man fell into a puddle, it was because
God was cha^ening him; if he avoided falling in,
o

The Stricken Deer

82

because God had given His angels special charge over
him. Their language is as absurd as their thought.
Elderly clerics write to young ladies to urge them not
to use rouge, in a Style which combines, but which does
not unite, those of Jeremiah and the polite letter-writer.
Middle-aged women paint their feelings on meeting
a favourite preacher in the voluptuous imagery of the
Song of Solomon. The world of Tom Jones is not
mo^l happily described in the language of the book of
Job. Elijah among the teacups cannot fail to be a
comic figure.

Yet in spite of its defe<fts, its absurdities, one cannot
refuse the Evangelicals one’s admiration. For they im¬
posed a moral order on life. Ignorance and fanaticism
made it an imperfeft order; but it was none the less
an order. And to those who believed in it the happen¬
ings of daily life were no longer isolated and purpose¬
less trifles, but integral parts of the great ilrufture of
exigence—a ^Irufture which, with all its limitations,
was centred around the profounde^t elements of man’s
nature. It alone among the philosophies of its time
took account of man’s spiritual side, wove into the
tapeftry of his ordinary life his visions, his enthusiasms,
his exaltations, faced and tried to explain the myftery
of his exigence, the omnipresence of evil, the inevit¬
ability of death. The merchant in the counting-house,
the spinner in the faftory, the old maid in the village,
all felt themselves aftors in the great drama of man¬
kind’s salvation. Revealed againft this tremendous
background, their lives assumed heroic proportions.
What did the trivialities of mere outward circumstances
matter ? Their friends were exultations, agonies
and love and man’s unconquerable mind. And the
compelling power of their faith was shown by their
adlions. It was they who purified the morals of
English society, who founded modern philanthropy,
who Slopped the slave trade. Nor could any creed

83 Life of Cowper

less passionately exclusive have so effeftively inspired
them. You muft look only to the Cross to be a
successful crusader.

Finally Evangelicalism—and in this also it was
unique among the philosophies of its day—could
satisfy the temperament of the arti^l. For it alone set
a supreme value on that emotional exaltation in which
the greatest art is produced, it alone made the imagina¬
tion the centre of its system, and not a mere decorative
appendage to it. An attitude of civilized disillusion¬
ment is all very well in its way, but it is not conducive to
creative art. Wesley could have understood Dante as
Voltaire or even Dr. Johnson could never have done.
The Evangelicals may have disliked poetry, but their
sublime conception of the universal plan is the moSl
imaginative poem of its day.

Surging and swirling, flowed on the vari-coloured
Stream or eighteenth-century life. People were born
and grew up; made money or loSt it; were serious,
were frivolous; yielded to a good impulse, yielded to
a bad one; had moments of ecStasy and forgot them;
made resolutions and failed to keep them; married
and grew old and died—their life an incoherent tangle
of hopes and fears, desires and inhibitions, aspirations
and apathies; heterogeneous, hand-to-mouth, without
order or sequence. But through it moved a small
band of people for whom the whole multifarious com¬
plex was resolved into a single and majeSlic adtion—
that conflidl which, as long as life laSls, the children of
light muSl wage with the Prince of the power of the
air. They were sometimes feeble and sometimes
erring, for they were mortal; but they never faltered
in their effort to measure their every word and adt by
the highest standard they knew. They did what they
thought right whatever trouble it got them into, and
whatever pleasure it deprived them of. Indeed, the
ephemeral joys and sorrows of the world meant little

The Stricken Deer 84

to them. On their brows lay the shadow of the wings
of death, and in their ears chimed ever the bells of
Paradise.

It was among this band of people that the next eight
years of Cowper’s life were passed. Their world was
a very different one from that of his youth—mildly
interested in everything, enthusia^ically intere^ed in
nothing. But Cowper was a different man. At the
outset of his life his nervous syftem had been infected
with a deadly poison. He had tried to expel it by
throwing himself into the life around him, trying to
identify himself with its intere^s, its pleasures and its
difficulties. The druggie had been long, but in the
end he succumbed. After two years his natural
vitality re-asserted itself and he recovered; but the
intere^s of his old life had lo^ all value in his eyes.
Society, family life, scholarship, public affairs—they
had been weighed and found wanting. Indeed, they
were inextricably mixed in his m^nd with failure and
dialler. His returning energy rejefted them and
turned elsewhere to find a worthy objeft for exigence—
tiu-ned to religion. He had always had leanings that
way. From childhood his fundamental conception of
life had been a religious one. The very nervous
diseases which had sent him mad had taken the form in
his mind of a convi6fion of damnation ; and his rare
monfents of religious emotion had been the only
moments of his lire when he was completely free from
nervous terror. It is true he had sought consolation
from religion without success; yet even when he had
felt such consolation further from him he had never
lo^ the conviction that it was the highe^ good, were
it possible to achieve it. Now, after his crucifixion of
the laft ten months, it remained the only good of his
early life that had not been spoilt. All other things on
which he had set his heart had proved powerless to
protect him again^ the onslaught of his secret enemy.

85 Life of Coviper

His spirit, filled to overflowing with the gratitude and
delight of recovery, saw in religion, and in religion
alone, the worthy objeft on which to pour itself out.
And the Nreturning tide of his health, the tremendous
reaction of joy after the anguish of the laft three years,
all the vigour of his re^ored mind and body, gushed
in one irresiftible torrent down this single channel.
Under its pressure his imaginative life rose to a pitch
of intensity never touched before. At lail the
earthy curtains through which elusive gleams of
Paradise had penetrated to him were torn down,
and he itood forth in the full blaze of the my^lic
vision.

He mu^l never lose it again : his whole life mu^l be
dedicated to its preservation. As people always do
under the ^ress of strong religious impulse, he longed
to incarnate his ecstasy, to find some tabulated pro¬
gramme of beliefs and duties, some rule and ritual of
daily life in which it could have permanent, praftical
expression. He was a convert, but he needed a
Church. It was this need that led him to the Evan¬
gelicals. He was not likely to be satisfied with the
religion of his childhood. He wanted a new form in
which to express a new emotion; and the only new
religious form accessible at St. Albans in 1765 was
Evangelicalism. It was peculiarly accessible to Cow-
per, because Dr. Cotton was an Evangelical, and only
too willing to encourage a tendency towards the truth
in anyone else. But Cowper needed no encourage¬
ment. The Evangelical creed might well seem
created to suit his particular case. It explained his
difficulties so exactly, so perfeftly enshrined his
aspirations. He knew, none better, the inefficacy of
works. For thirty years he had lived a moral and
respectable life. Yet he had never known a moment’s
real peace of mind; and when the powers of evil had
attacked him, he had succumbed with hardly a show of

The Stricken Deer

86

resiftance. He realized man’s inability to save his
own soul. Had not the Divine Grace shone forth on
him long after he had ceased to struggle againft evil,
and was lying bereft even of reason } He knew that
faith alone juftified. The faith inspired by his moment
of vision had raised him to a level of spiritual exaltation,
that all the vigilant virtue of his youth had never
brought him within sight of. In the light of the
Evangelical creed, the wretched tangle of his life-
hiftory fell into a simple beneficent order—the plan
by which an all-wise and all-loving God had reclaimed
a soul stubborn to seek its own de^lruftion. He had
been born a child of wrath, incapable of a good thought
or a good deed, predestined to damnation. Once or
twice God had let fall a ray of His grace upon him, but,
seduced by the pleasures of the world, he had shut his
eyes. On the threshold therefore of his manhood
God had plunged him into a melancholia, had over¬
whelmed him with spiritual fears; and then, as
suddenly, had removed them and filled him -with
spiritual happiness. But again he had neglected His
message. Then indeed God, determined to save him
in his own despite, had turned to Stronger measures.
Gradually He removed from his life all that might
diStradt Cowper’s soul from the love of Him; He
deprived him of his love, friends and family. But juSt
when Cowper, maddened by misfortune, was about to
decide his damnation by committing the frightful sin
of self-murder, God miraculously rescued him, showed
him to himself as the vile creature he really was, and
revealed the hell that was in Store for him if he proceeded
in his evil doings. Finally, when he was Still trembling
under this newly-found consciousness of sin. He turned
the full light of His grace upon him. He saw it and
was converted.

Seen from this angle, those evils for which he had
thought his life was singled out from the reSl of man-

87 Lije oj Cowper

kind ceased to appear evil, or vanished altogether. If
he was weak and contemptible, a puppet in the hands
of a higher power, so was every other created being.
And that higher power was no inexorable, malevolent
deity, but a loving and omnipotent Father. Again,
happiness was no longer a transitory and precarious
condition. His present happiness arose from the faft
that he had at laft “ laid hold of his salvation,’^ and the
^late of his salvation was of its nature eternal. He
was in the hands of God, and no torments could touch
him ever any more.

Nor did the ascetic side of Evangelicalism put him
off. The pleasures of the world held no attraftion for
him; and the very idea that they might di^lraft him
from the right way was enough to make him give them
up. But he had no fears that he would ever be so
diftrafted. He, nervous, apprehensive William Cow¬
per, whose whole existence had been dominated by the
desire to avoid real or imagined danger, could now turn
and look at life and see onjy good. No wonder he
wished to consecrate his whole life to the God who
had so wonderfully blessed him. The span of man’s
existence seemed all too short to express his joy and
gratitude. His ordinary mental condition for months
on end was a pitch of ecstasy such as moSt men experi¬
ence once or twice in their lives for a single moment.
He seemed to live his life to a sound of celestial music,
to get up and go to bed, to work and eat and sleep, to
the accompaniment of an unseen orchestra of flutes
and shawms and violins. Summer bloomed in his
heart as it bloomed in the garden outside. ^ Up in the
trees the birds were singing, and in his thoughts too
the birds of happiness sang and soared and clapped
their wings of silver and gold. Every word he spoke,
every letter he wrote, was breathless with ecstasy.
Lyrically, incoherently, garrulously, he proclaimed
and re-proclaimed the glory of his redemption. The

88

The Stricken Deer

quiet Hertfordshire garden used to ringwith his rhapso¬
dies. They could not command an adequate audience
—it was confined generally to Sam, the kind, solid
servant who had nursed him through his illness, the
cobbler’s boy Dick Colman, an open-mouthed urchin
of seven years old, and Dr. Cotton himself. Poor
Dr. Cotton! He sometimes wondered if Cowper
saved was much saner than Cowper damned. He was
certainly quite as great a ^rain to talk to. However,
Dr. Cotton was an Evangelical, and accu^omed to
such ordeals, and he ^rove to calm his patient by
giving him a book to read called Meditations among
the Tombs,

So passed a year. In May 1765 Cowper was ready
to leave St. Albans. But where was he to go ? His
friends lived mostly in London, but London he held
in horror—it was connected indissolubly with his
miserable pail. It was there he had fallen away in
1753; and there he had passed through his moil
frightful agony. He wanted to shut the door on his
pa« altogether and settle in some secluded spot where,
undiilurbed by painful memories and unseduced by
wdrldly pleasures, he could devote himself to religious
contemplation. It was exactly the same inmulse as
makes people go into monaileries. But Cowper’s
religion provided no monaileries. However, an
unofficial hermitage in some country place would do
as well. He had always turned for happiness to the
country, to rural sights and sounds ana silence; and
such a change would moil effeftively cut him off from
his old life.

In nothing has English life changed more since 1765
than in the relative positions of town and country.
Before the day of trams and motors and newspapers
and wireless, country people lived in a different world
from townspeople, a world that did not centre round
London at all. They got up at a different time, dined

89 Lije oj Cowper

at a different time, did not try to follow town fashions.
They only heard such news of London as could be
gleaned from a fortnight-old St. James's Gazette lent
them by the sguire. Their very speech was different.
Old comedy is full of loutish country squires, Sir
Wilful Witwould and Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, who arrive
in town to find themselves the butts of the wits for their
queer clothes and queerer accents and their ignorance
of the outstanding events of the day. And country
diSlrifts were as remote from each other as from
London. To go to live in a different part of the
country was like going to live abroad to-day. You
had to learn to order your life according to new cuSloms,
to call common objefts by new names. Nor could you
hold much communication with the place you had left
when it was distant two or three days’ journey in a
creaking, Stuffy coach over a road like a cart-track, and
it coSt five shillings to send a letter. Near relations
lived within twenty miles of each other without meeting
for ten years. Cowper’s decision to live in the country
meant that he was only likely to see the friends of his
youth once or twice again before he died. It was a
fitting; symbol that he had be^un life anew.

His relations, however, did not want him to go
beyond all reach of help. In the end it was decided
that he should settle, for the time being at any rate,
somewhere near Cambridge, so that his brother could
keep an eye on him. The neareSl place in which his
brother could find the cheap, quiet lodgings required
was Huntingdon. It was over fifteen miles from
Cambridge—too far for John Cowper to see William
very often—but to William in his present conditio
solitude meant only more time to be alone with God.

“ Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,” he sang,

“ From strife and tumult far;

From scenes where Satan wages ftill
His moft successful war.

The Stricken Deer

90

The calm retreat, the silent shade,

With prayer and praise agree;

And seem, by Thy sweet bounty made,

For those who follow Thee.

There if Thy Spirit touch the soul,

And grace her mean abode,

O with what peace, and joy, and love,

She communes with her God !

There like the nightingale she pours
Her solitary lays;

Nor asks a witness of her song,

Nor thirds for human praise.’*

The lodgings were engaged, and on June 17, 1765,
he Parted for Cambridge, where he was to spend a
night on the way. He could not forbear a tremor as
he got into the coach. For two years he had been
virtually out of the world; and now, at his firft
encounter with it, his natural timidity swept irresistibly
over him. Perhaps someone would blaspheme againft
the God whom he served: and then, fearful thought,
it would be his duty to reprove them. Fortunately
the coach travelled all the way from St. Albans to
Cambridge without a single oath passing anyone’s lips.
He sat up late that night with his brother, pouring forth
the Slory of his conversion, and exhorting him, in a
trembling voice, to follow his example. John Cowper
felt embarrassed. His religion was a mild, cultured
affair with leanings towards Unitarianism; and he,
like Dr. Cotton, thought Cowper’s apocalyptic rejoic¬
ings only less insane than his apocalyptic despair. On
the other hand, he did not wish to hurt his feelings
by speaking against something which had made his
brother so happy. He made a Few tentative objeftions,
and finally tried to close the discussion by saying that
he was sure that at bottom they meant the same thing.
William Cowper did not think so at all. He had been
talking for hours in order to prove exaftly the reverse.

gi Lije oj Cowper

He relapsed into a disappointed silence, only com¬
forting himself with the hope that for some good
purpose his brother’s conversion was being delayed
till a later time. Four days later he left Cambridge
and drove over to Huntingdon. At firil he could not
restrain a slight feeling of depression. It was all very
well to praise solitude at Dr. Cotton’s, with kind faces
and kind voices within call whenever he should need
them ; but sitting in his poky little lodgings in a com¬
pletely Grange town he could not help feeling rather
lonely. There was not a soul he could talk to within
miles. And he was so shy of making new friends.
However, the fire of his faith was not so easily extin¬
guished. ‘T walked forth toward the close of day,”
he wrote, in this melancholy frame of mind, and
having wandered about a mile from the town, I found
my heart at length so powerfully drawn towards the
Lord that, having gained a retired and secret nook in
the corner of a field, I kneeled down under a bank and
poured forth my complaints before Him. It pleased
my Saviour to hear me in that this my depression
was taken off and I was enabled to trust in Him.”
On the following day he was confirmed in this
quickening of the spirit. It was Sunday; and for
the fir^l time since his illness he went to church.
The dignified ceremonial, the stately English of the
prayers, the music, the building, above all the un¬
accustomed sense of corporate worship, profoundly
Stirred a spirit ever open to aeSthetic impression. The
lesson was the beautiful Story of the Prodigal Son. To
Cowper it seemed a parable of his own life; as he
listened to it his soul was again filled with some of the
ecStasy of the moment of conversion. He could hardly
restrain his tears; his heart leapt out in love to the

n le round him; especially, as he naively puts it,
ose in whom he observed “ an air of sober atten¬
tion,” He gazed at a gentleman singing psalms in

The Stricken Deer

92

his pew, blessed him in his heart and blessed him
again. How foolish- had been his despondency I
Had it not always been the triumphant boa^ of
his faith that it could uphold and console him in any
circum^ances ? And had not this, his firft solitary
adventure into the world, proved this boail abundantly
ju^ihed ?

However, as the weeks passed he found he did not
have to rely solely on spiritual compensation for his
loneliness. Life at Huntingdon possessed more
mundane sources of comfort. For one thin^ there
were the pleasures of Nature. He did not, indeed,
admire the country: nothing could be further from the
bosky groves and smiling glades which were what the
eighteenth century meant by beautiful scenery than
the fens, that Grange no man’s land between earth and
sea, but more like the sea, as it Wretched, level and bare,
into the distance, with here and there a church kicking
up from it like a ship, and over all the vaft, varying
sky; now gleaming blue, now hidden by driving rain,
now troubled with moving masses of cloud; by night
swarming with ^ars, tragic in the red light of the
setting sun. Cowper told Lady Hesketh it was
merely “ flat and insipid.” He could not feel in it
that sense of space and wind and lonely freedom which
it shares with other flat landscape, Holland and
Romney Marsh; which blows so poignantly from the
canvases of those painters of Norwich who depifted
it forty years later. But any country was better than
no country; and he enjoyed bathing in the River Ouse
and wandering along among the blue willows on its
banks. Not that he was always alone, either. He
made some acquaintances; two clergymen, Mr.
Hodson and Mr. Nicholson, who, if not Evangelical,
were at leaft unworldly; and Mr. Pemberton, the
woollen draper, who was so kind as to offer to lend him
St, James's Gazette. And once a week, mounted on

93 of Cowper

the back of a horse, he clattered off to Cambridge to
see John.

Still, it became clear that such a mode of exigence
could only be temporary. From a purely practical
point of view Cowper was incapable of managing for
himself. Buying meat, for inftance, was a terrible
problem. Firft he bought a leg of lamb, and that was
too much; then a sheep’s heart, and that was too little;
then he fell back on liver, but that soon began to pall.
“ I never knew how to pity poor housekeepers before,”
he writes pathetically, “ but now I cease to wonder at
that politic ca^ which their occupation usually gives
to their countenance; for it really is a matter full of
perplexity.” You have to eat even if you are saved.
And the wor^ of the whole affair was that within four
months he had spent a year’s income.

But over and above all this, he felt the mental ^rain.
Nothing is more wearing than living alone. The
ordinary mould of social habit and cuftom by which
life is direfted and regulated in any corporate form of
exigence is removed. You go out when you like, and
work when you like, and go to bed when you like. All
the thousand trifling afts of daily life become the
subjedfs of decision; and making a decision is the mo^f
tiring thing in the world. It was especially tiring
to someone like Cowper, who all his life had liked
something to lean on. His very dislike of meeting
strangers arose in ^reat part from the fadl that such
meetings involved his taking the social initiative. The
only mode of life that exaftly suited him, the only mode
of lif(f that had ever exadlly suited him, was family life;
it provided the quiet social circle he liked, and in it all
the pradlical side of life was managed for him. But it
was hard to get what he wanted. The obvious way to
get family life is to marry and have a family of your
own; bqt Cowper in his present Aate of mind had no
thoughts of marriage. It would have to be someone

The Stricken Deer

94

else’s family, and, if he was to be really happy, one that
would sympathize with his religious views. What he
needed was a familjr of pleasant, cultivated Evangelicals
who would be willing to take a strange young man just
out of an asylum and with hardly any money to live
with them indefinitely. It seemed an unlikely thing
to find; but for once in his life Cowper was lucky.
He found it at Huntingdon.

One September morning as he was taking the air
under the trees after church, he was accofted by a young
man, who said that his name was Unwin, and that he
had often wanted to speak to Cowper before, but that
he had felt too shy, as ne had heard that he avoided new
acquaintances. Cowper liked the look of him. He
had a bright, open, friendly countenance and a forth¬
coming manner; and Cowper asked him to tea. The
meal confirmed his good impression. His new friend
was everything he liked beft—intelligent, full of youth¬
ful spirits, simple, unassuming, and, be^ of all, a ^rong
Evangelical. Within a short time he had told Cowper
all about himself—how his father was a clergyman, and
how he was going to be a clergyman too; that he was
working at Cambridge, but was living in Huntingdon
with his father, mother and siller. On his departure
Cowper flung himself on his knees, to ask a blessing on
this friendship from the God to whom he had vowed to
consecrate all his aftivities.

Next day he returned Unwin’s call, and found the
reft of the family as delightful as himself. On arriving
he found himself in the little parlour with the daughter.
He had never seen her before; but she began con¬
versation in such a friendly, quiet way that soon he felt
quite at his ease. The father was a scholarly old
parson, “ as simple as Parson Adams ”; while the
mother, much younger than her husband—in faft only
eight or nine years older than Cowper—ftruck him as
having “ uncommon underftanding, and more polite-

95 Life of Cowper

than a duchess/* He enjoyed his visit immensely.
He sincerely hoped he would see more of the Unwins.
He did not know that his connexion with them would
only be severed by death.

The Unwins were as pleased with Cowper as he
with them. They had originally moved from Grimfton
and come to live in Huntingdon because Mrs. Unwin
wanted better company than the sequestered position of
GrimSton afforded. Huntingdon had not proved very
fruitful of good company. The people there were
either Stupid or too worldly in their interests for the
Evangelical Unwins; and these soon found them¬
selves as much alone as they had been at GrimSton.
Imagine their delight on meeting a young man, clever,
educated, with the moSt charming manners, and even
more Evangelical than themselves. With such good¬
will on both sides the acquaintance could not ik\\ to
ripen quickly into friendship. The Unwins asked
him to come whenever he liked. He was shy at firSt;
but they were so friendly, and he was so solitary, that
they did not have much difficulty in winning him over.
And soon he spent the beSl part of every day with
them. “ Go when I will,** he writes, “ I find a house
filled with peace and cordiality in all its parts. I am
sure to hear no scandal, but such discourse as we are all
better for. You remember Rousseau*s description of
an English morning—such are the mornings I spend
with these good people. The evenings differ from
them in nothing except that they are Still more snug and
quieter. Now I know them, I wonder I liked Hunting¬
don so well, and am apt to think I should find any place
disagreeable which had not an Unwin belonging to it.**

For life at the Unwins* satisfied his desires as no
other could have done. It combined the two things
which in his chequered thirty-three years really won
his affeftion—family life and the Evangelical faith.
From the very firft meeting, the Unwins had looked on

The Stricken Deer 96

him as a relation, and had not, in the manner of their
time, treated all his visits as ceremonious occasions,
but admitted him to share in their ordinary occupations
and conversations as if he were a brother. And he
enjoyed with them all the intimacy, the companionship,
the cosy fireside fun, the sense of communal cousinly
work and play that he had hankered after ever since his
mother’s death, and that he had tasted for a little with
his uncle’s family in Southampton Row. But here
was Southampton Row purified from all taint of the
world, and sanctified by that faith which since St.
Alban’s had been the lode^ar of his life. Life at the
Unwins’ was dedicated to religion. All their employ¬
ments, their conversations, their reading, their music
were religious. Cowper felt he had forsaken the world
to follow the Lord, and now the Lord had rewarded
him by giving him back all that had made the world
attractive. The roomy, red-brick house, with its
rambling garden with the pear tree in it, seemed a sort
of earthly paradise to him, in which Mrs. Unwin sat
enthroned—the patron saint.

Gradually, as the weeks went by, she began to ^and
out from the others. All that he loved in the Unwin
household tended to identify itself with her. As the
weeks went by her name appeared in his correspondence
with growing frequency. Suddenly at the end of a
letter to Joseph Hill about something quite different,
he would add as a po^script: “ And I know no one as
like Mrs. Unwin as my Aunt Madan—I do not mean
in person, but in character.” And again, to Lady
Hesketh: “ I met Mrs. Unwin in the Street and went
home with her. She and I walked together nearly two
hours in the garden, and I had a conversation which did
me more good than I should have received from an
audience with the fir^ prince in Europe. That woman
is a blessing to me, and I feel every time I see her as
being the better for her company.” The reft of the

97 of Conoper

family be|[an to recede into the background. Old
Mr. Unwin, indeed, was rather 6ut of the Evangelical
piAure. He belonged to a less zealous type of eigh¬
teenth-century clergyman. Polite and scnolarly, he
doubted the divinity of Christ, and was incurably idle
in the performance of his duties. Grimfton was not a
large parish, but he seems to have christened, married
or buried hardly anyone in it. At Huntingdon his
duties were even lighter; but there he never performed
them at all. His unfortunate parishioners censured
him frequently, and even threatened to expel him; in
vain. As he began to know him better, Cowper could
not reconcile his conscience with whole-hearted
approval of Mr. Unwin. Miss Unwin, too, ceased
to occupy much of Cowper’s attention after their firSf
interview. He noticed that she was bashful and
unwilling to speak when her mother was there.
Perhaps she alone of the family did not altogether like
the new visitor. For charming, ardent William
Unwin, Cowper’s affeilion showed no signs of waning.
But he was only twenty-one, and he was not a woman.
Cowper’s mo^ intimate friends were always women ;
for they alone could give that particular moral support
of intereil and sympathy which he moil wanted in a
friend. As a child he had leaned on his mother; as a
youth on his cousins ; and now, as a mature man, worn
with suffering and ecilasy, he turned to Mrs. Unwin.

She was peculiarly fitted to bear the weight. Like
the life of which she was the centre, she gave him all
he had loved in his old exiilence, with additional
qualities it could not provide. Beside Harriet and
Theodora she would, it is true, have seemed a little

f rovincial. Her manners had a country stiffness.

ler talk was sprinkled with the curious Biblical
phraseology of Evangelicalism. “ The Lord Jehovah
will be alone exalted when the day of his deliverance
comes,” she writes of Cowper when he was not

H

The Stricken Deer 98

well. But she was not unsocial—had she not come to
Huntin|[don for company ?—she had humour, though
of the kind that sees rather than makes jokes; and she
was well read in a serious Evangelical sort of way.
Her distinguishing qualities, however, were to be found
not in her mind or in her manners, but in her character.

It was simple, its interest centring exclusively round
two objects—the religious and the personal. And it
was Strong, but with a feminine Strength, inStin£tive,
passive, tenacious. In religion she was a disciple, not
a leader; and in the outward ordering of her personal
life she was chiefly concerned to carry out the wishes
of those she cared for. But within her own sphere
she adted with the unhurried confidence of supreme
determination. She never analyzed her feelings or
questioned her beliefs; she thought some things right
and did them, and some things wrong and did not do
them. If by chance she erred, she made no excuses
for herself, butwaStedno time in useless self-upbraiding.
Her personal feelings were of a piece with the reSt
of her—Strong but not violent, deep but not over¬
flowing. She was not given to outbursts of emotional
feeling; but when she did give her heart, it was
absolutely and for ever. There was no sacrifice she
would not make for someone she loved. Yet even in
regard to them she adhered rigidly to her simple code of
right and wrong. She would not allow her affedtion
to blind her to their faults; nor would she tell them she
approved of them when she did not, for fear of hurting
their feelings. . She was at one with herself; and from
this her personality drew a calm force which differenti¬
ated it from that or the ordinary pious domeSlic woman.
Even now, from the dingy, ill-drawn engraving which
is all the portrait we have of her, her eyes gaze out
beneath her clear forehead with a serene, diredl,
sensible expression that soothes us, as it soothed Cowper
long ago.

99 oj Cowper

It was no wonder he liked her. For she supplied
all the qualities he lacked. He did not mind if she
was limited, unsubtle, without ideas of her own. He
wanted not guidance, but support; and support was
juft what she was fitted to give. Strength and sanity
and repose were the qualities he always liked in a friend ;
but he generally found them only in people who
thought his religion queer. She believed all the same
things as he believed, but with a contented, equable
confidence quite beyond his compass. He was certain
that whatever doubts and terrors, “ flaws and ftarts,
impoftors to true fear,’^ he might feel, however much
his mood might vary between unreasonable exaltation
and unreasonable despair, she would always be the same
—firm and safe and sure; that when he came into her
room trembling from some qualm of conscience, some
horrid vision of the night, she would turn untroubled
eyes upon him, lay aside her work, and in quiet tones
and unexag^erated terms affirm those consoling truths
he was longing to hear. And he would be reassured.*

Their intimacy increased all the quicker on account
of its peculiar circumftances. Mrs. Unwin's position
as the centre of a grown-up family had presented her
to Cowper in a maternal light. It was part of her
attraftion to one who, ever since he was six years old,
had felt the need of a mother so keenly. And of course
it removed any embarrassment he might naturally have
felt at becoming so intimate with a ftrange woman.
But, in faft, she was almoft the same age as himself;
so that he enjoyed in her company all the underftanding
and sense of sympathetic equality that one only gets
from a contemporary. She was, in faft, Theodora and
Harriet and his mother all in one. He supplied her
needs as she supplied his. She was ftill a comparatively
young woman, but her husband was old and her
children were grown up. Her life was empty: it
lacked objeft, intereft, occupation. And she had no

The Stricken Deer

lOO

one to guide her in that Evangelical faith which was
beginning to play such a large part in her life. In
Cowper she found someone who needed her and who
could aft as her spiritual direftor. And the drab,
provincial society in which she had hitherto lived laid
her peculiarly open to the charm he always had for
women.

After he had known the Unwins three months, he
went to live with them. Ever since he had met them,
his dislike of living alone had returned with a redoubled
ftrength. How could he persuade himself he enjoyed
it when he had the pleasures of family life every day
before his eyes ? One day it crossed his mind that
the Unwins might take him in as a lodger. He tried
to put the idea out of his thoughts. He felt it the work
of the flesh trying to mould his life according to its
selfish desires; and was it not his creed to purge him¬
self of all selfish desire, and accept whatever fate God
might choose for him But he could not silence his
longings; and try as he might he thought of little else
for three days. By the end of the third he had suc¬
ceeded in fixing his outward attention, at leaft, on
something else. But as he was sitting meditating in
his room the words “ The Lord of Hofts will do this *’
came unawares into his mind, and began to run in his
head like a tune ; reiterating themselves, as it seemed,
louder , and louder and more and more urgently, till at
laft he began to think that someone was whispering
them in his ear. They muft be a sign from Heaven;
but a sign of what.? He turned involuntarily for an
explanation to the thought that had never ceased to
dominate his subconscious mind. Could it be that
God wanted him to live with the Unwins ? It should
be, it muft be so I Joyfully snatching at the idea, he
rushed off to see them. They accepted the proposal,
and within a few days he had moved in.

He had found his monaftery. Here at length was

lOI

Lije of CanjDper

that calm retreat, that silent shade, in which he could
consecrate his exigence to keeping pure and bright the
ethereal flame of spiritual eeftasy that was all that made
life worth living to him. Cowper’s life with the
Unwins is the complete example of the Evangelical
ideal, of the holy home, in the world, but not of it—
the religious life lived in conjunction with the customs
and comforts of the ordinary eighteenth-century
middle-class family. It is a perfeft period piece, rising
before one’s inner eye, as one reads of it, like a series
of faded mezzotints after Morland—The Pious Family
in Four Plates: Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Evening
—their titles engraved beneath them in slim copper¬
plate, in which gentlemen in huge cravats and ladies in
voluminous skirts of white muslin read the Bible, and
relieve the poor, and take part in family worship, with
an expression of discreet benevolence on their small
faces. Cowper’s day was mapped out in accordance
with a Hrift scheme of Evangelical devotion. On
waking he spent a little time in prayer. Breakfast was
between eight and nine, and afterwards the family
assembled in the parlour, where Cowper or young
Unwin read aloud the Scriptures or the sermonsof some
faithful preacher, while the ladies liftened with heads
bent and needles flashing over their work. By a
quarter to eleven it was time to get ready for church,
which la^ed till twelve. After that came a break.
Dinner was at three, and till then you could do whatyou
liked. On wet days Cowper used to sit up in his room
reading or writing letters. But he preferred to be out,
riding or walking, or, bell of all, gardening. He had
never had a garden before, but there was something
in the occupation at once so innocent and so civilized,
so rural and so dome^icated, that was in harmony with
his whole nature. And the steady manual work was
now especially soothing to his weak nerves and strong
body. He spent hours digging and planting and

The Stricken Deer

102

weeding in the old tangled garden, where the air was
sweet with the scent of jessamine, and where the lime
trees ^lood up leafy beyond the wall. At three
o’clock came dinner; then a little conversation in the
garden till tea, an hour later. And after tea, except in
mid-winter, when it had to be taken earlier, came a walk.
This walk was the central point of the day. Cowper
generally went with Mrs. Unwin; they walked four
miles at lea^, and talked all the time. Can we not
picture them, moving very slowly—for it was impossible
to move quickly in their clothes—Mrs. Unwin dressed
neatly, but a little behind the fashion, her hair parted
smoothly beneath her little cap, and Cowper’s lanky
figure inclined towards her in an attitude of old-
fashioned courtesy; while far around stretched the
fens, drowsy green in the summer sun, or a sheet of
ileel-coioured water when the winter floods were out ?
After the walk they spent the time in serious talk and
reading till supper; or, sometimes gathered together
in that quiet sitting-room, with the night shut out by
curtains, the little band of believers would lift up their
voices in a hymn of praise to the Author of their
conversion; while the simple ^Irain echoed itself in the
frail, precise tones of the harpsichord played by Mrs.
Unwin as accompanist. Prayers for the household
followed. And then they climbed the Stairs to bed, their
candles caSting ludicrous leaping shadow shapes of
themselves on baniSter and ceiling, so that Cowper
pranked round Cowper up the Stairs and even Mr.
Unwin saw himself fantaftic. One laSt prayer, and
Cowper was in bed and asleep before the church clock
chimed half-paSt ten.

So passed the day; and so passed every day that
followed. Outside, the genteel society of Huntingdon
dined and played cards and went to the races. But the
Unwin household saw as little of all this as if they lived
a hundred miles away. The rigid order of their

103 Lije oj Cowper

exigence closed them in as with a high wall. For
them the passage of the year was marked not by the
mundane occasions which marked it for the reSt of
England, but Moslem-like, by calls to prayer. They
paid as little heed to the serious, as to the frivolous
affairs of the world. In 1767 George the Third,
mi^fakenlv anxious to diredl the policy of the country
himself, dismissed Lord Rockingham’s Government;
and Huntingdon, in company with the reif of England,
was the scene of one of those drinking, brawling,
bribing eleftions that live for us ^fill on the canvasses of
Hogarth. How Cowper would have thrilled to it in
the old days 1 How he would have argued and shouted
and tossed his hat in the air 1 Now he hardly spared
the time to give it a passing contemptuous glance.
** Truly I wish it was over,” he commented to Hill,
“ for it occasions the moft deteftable scene of profligacy
and riot that can be conceived.”

Corporate aftivity generates an ardour unattainable
alone ; and the Evangelical zeal of the little household
grew with every day they spent together. Mrs.
Unwin’s old acquaintance—decent, respeftable people
who were not above liking their joke—complained
when they came to see her that she had loft all her
old sprightliness and was grown quite a Methodift.
As for Cowper, one would have thought it impossible
to become more religious than he was already; but he
did—at leaft more exclusively religious. Ever since
his conversion the world had loft its attraction for
him; but he had not altogether forgotten its exiftence.
Now, required as he was to concentrate on religious
ideas every hour of the day, he ceased to be able to
turn his mind to any other. Indeed, to do so was
againft the principles of his faith. His very recreations
grew religious. When he talked it was to discuss some
theological point or to recount his religious experi¬
ences ; when he read, his book was devotional. If he

Tht Stricken Deer

104

wrote poetry it was a hymn; if prose it was a meditation
or the pious chronicle of his spiritual pilgrimage. His
literary ftyle was changing with the change in his ideas.
In his letters passages about secular life in the easy,
humorous, Addisonian ^yle of his youth alternate
with others on religious topics written in the regular
Evangelical manner—surging, ejaculatory, riddled with
repetitions, ftiff with Biblicd phrases. “ If I were as
genteel as I am negligent I should be the moil delight¬
ful creature in the universe,” he would write in one
sentence, and then, a few lines later: “ A thousand
worlds will vanish at the consummation of all things.
But the word of God itands fail, and they who truil in
Him shall not be confounded.”

Every incident of his uneventful life he now
examined and judged from an Evangelical point of
view. He began to apply a sort of moral microscope
to his aflions. In the April of 1767 young Unwin
went on a visit to Hertfordshire, and Cowper gave him
an introduftion to a cousin, Mrs. Cowper. It seemed
a harmless enough thing to do. But his conscience
soon found something to deplore in it; and he felt he
ought to make a confession to his cousin. ” Though
my friend,” he wrote to her, ” before I was admitted
as an inmate here was satisfied that I was not a mere
vagabond, yet I could not resi^l the opportunity of
furnishing him with ocular demonftration of it, by
introducing him to one of my moft splendid con¬
nexions ; that when he hears me called ‘ that fellow
Cowper ’ he may be able, upon unqueXionable
evidence, to assert my gentlemanhood and relieve me
fromtheweight of that opprobrious appellation . . . you
will be more ready to excuse me than I am to excuse
n^self. But in good truth it was abominable pride
of heart and indignation and vanity.”

This Mrs. Cowper was gradually usurping Lady
Hesketh’s place in Cowper’s correspondence. He

I©5 Lije oj Cowper

had never known her well before; but she shared his
religious views, and in his present ftate of mind he
cared only to talk of religion. How could he speak of
it freely to Lady Hesketh, who would not believe that
he had ever been a great sinner, and who showed only
too clearly that she considered his present condition
dangerously “ enthusiastic ” ? Indeed, for all her
seeming virtue, was she not herself a child of wrath
predestined to damnation ? He hated to believe it,
but believe it he muSt. “ How lovely,” he exclaimed
wistfully, “ muSt be the spirits of juSt men made
perfect, since creatures so lovely in our eyes may yet
have the wrath of God abiding on them.” They both
felt that an unbridgeable gulf had opened between
them; and tacitly, without hard feeling on either side,
their connection lapsed. He was no happier about
Harriet’s father than about Harriet. What was he to
think of a man who, at the age of sixty-six, regardless
of the pit of Tophet to which at any moment he might
be consigned, published a volume of secular poems ?
And such poems, too 1 ” That holy and blessed Name

to which he bows his head on the Sabbath is treated
with as little reverence as that of Mahomet. He has,
indeed, packed and jumbled them together in a manner
very shocking to a Christian reader.” As far as he
could see, except for Mrs. Cowper'and the Madans,
his whole family were likely to go to hell. He began
even to have doubts about the fate of his father. Dr.
Cowper, it is true, had never so far forgotten himself
as to put the name of his Creator in an unseemly
juxtaposition to that of Mahomet. Cowper himself
admitted that he was “ everything that was excellent
and praiseworthy towards men.” But if he were
not in grace this would avail him nothing. And
had he died in grace ? Poor Cowper I He could
not but feel that any doubts on such a subjeCl were
unfilial; but in the exalted atmosphere he now

The Stricken Deer io6

moved in he tended to lose his sense of natural
obligations.

His relations thought that he had loft his sense of
other obligations as well. Cowper had no more money
of his own now than he had before he went mad ; and
he was principally supported by a fund made up by his
family. What was their irritation to learn that not
only had he, by sheer mismanagement, exceeded his
yearly income by ;^I40, but that he had brought Dr.
Cotton’s servant—Sam Roberts—and Dick Colman,
the cobbler’s boy, from St. Alban’s to live with him.
His motive in doing this had been pure benevolence.
He believed them to be on the high road to conversion,
and wished to keep them with him left they should be
diftrafted by the temptations of the world. Unluckily
he had no money to support them; so that they had
to be supported by his unconverted relatives. And to
their unenlightened minds it merely looked as if he
kept two servants at their expense. They were very
angry, and one. Major Cowper, threatened to withdraw
his subscription. Cowper explained and apologized
profusely, and was so patently innocent of any wish to
impose on anyone, that the ftorm blew over. The
Unwins helped him to reduce his expenditure by let¬
ting him off half his rent, and he paid his debts by a
small sacrifice of capital. But, try as he might, he
never became a good manager. A faith that might
remove mountains could not make him economical.

In spite of these small clouds, he was very happy at
Huntingdon. His life was beautiful, with the beauty
of the cloifter, where, far from the aimless hurry of the
world, and freed from the pains of expectation and
disappointment, man passes his exiftence in a peaceful
round of devotion to God. But it was the cloifter
without its chill, its unnatural renunciation of natural
feelings. On the other hand, it managed to avoid the
dowdy unloveliness of the Puritan home. It was more

107 Life oj Cowper

like the Anglican community of Little Gidding than
anything else—that community where Crashaw wrote
his poems and John Inglesant met Mary Colet. But
its spirit differed from that of Little Gidding as the
eighteenth century differs from the seventeenth, or
the hymns of Charles Wesley from those of Henry
Vaughan. It was less jewelled, less soaring, less
sacramental, more friendly, easier, more intimate.
There was a snatch of morning about it, a nursery
freshness, an innocent, lavender-scented sweetness.
The very Calvinism it professed so conscientiously had
lo^l its fting. In that kindly atmosphere, super^lition
and narrowness assumed the charafter of quaint,
almost lovable, foibles. It thought a great number of
things wrong, but it did not exult in fierce delight over
the probable fate of the sinner ; it shunned the vanities
of the world, but approved a decent comeliness and
order. Its monotony is enlivened by little courtesies,
movements of impulsive kindness, flights of gentle
humour. As Cowper said, “ Such a life is consi^ent
with the utmoil enjoyment.*’

It was suddenly broken into. One day, about two
years after he had gone to Huntingdon, old Mr. Unwin
fell off his horse and cracked his skull. For four days
the family hung over his bed ^Iriving to catch, in his
delirious mutterings, some tracer of that Evangelical
faith that alone, in their view, could save him in the
world he was about to enter; on the fourth he died.
Cowper*s life was unavoidably changed. There was
no queftion, indeed, of hisseparatingrrom Mrs. Unwin.
Each had become an indispensable condition of the
other’s exigence. To him she was that rock of support
and sympathy for which he had yearned ever since he
was a child; while she found in" him at laif a worthy
objeft on which to pour forth the energy of her devoted,
undemonftrative, possessive nature. The personal
bond that united them was the closed either was ever

The Stricken Deer ro8

to know. Was it a bond of love ? Cowpcr, fearful
of any idea that might interfere with their present
perfeft intimacy, clung to the view that the relation
was filial. “ Mrs. Unwin,” he assured a correspondent
with anxious emphasis, ” looks on me completely as a
son.” But it is not natural to live in a filial relation
to a woman only a few years older than yourself, to
whom you are not related, and whom you had never
seen till you were thirty-three. It could not la^l.
Already Cowper was imperceptibly growing to feel
on more equal terms with her. And with a few
more years his feelings were to settle into a simple
tenderness that had its roots in the very fibres of
his being. It was a sentiment of exquisite beauty,
vigilant, humble, selfless, and it shines through the
mingled gleam and dark of his later years like a clear
white flame. Nor was his relation with her without
that sense of emotional adventure, that intimacy some¬
how closer for the very formalities through which it
muil be expressed, that can only come between persons
of different sex. But it never had the diftinftive
charafter of passionate love—it lacked the doubts and
ardours and jealousies that characterized even so
lukewarm an affair as Cowper’s youthful sentiment
for Theodora. Passion, indeed, was alien to his
nature; his deepest feelings were all affeftions. It is
foolish to suppose that a man muft be passionately in
love with every woman he singles out for intimacy,
above all a man of the ethereal, hyper-civilized type of
Cowper.

Her feelings were altogether more straightforward.
At firSl, indeed, she cannot have thought herself in
love, any more than Cowper did, or, with her principles
and her Strength of charafter, she would have felt forced
to break with him. And to the end of her life she
always alluded to “ Mr. Cowper ” with the decorous
formality of an acquaintance. But for his sake she

109 9 f Covoper

was to show herself prepared to risk the loss of her
income, her family and her good name—prepared, in
faft, for the loss or anything except Cowper. Him she
would not even share with anyone else. Her nature
was a simple one, not given to fine feelings or fine
di^inAions. It is unnecessary to try to believe that
she was not in love with Cowper.

Mr. Unwin’s death, then, did not break up the little
household; but it decided its removal. Now that
they were free to do so, both Cowper and Mrs. Unwin
longed to gratify that deareft of all wishes of the
Evangelical heart, to settle in a “ faithful ” neighbour¬
hood near some “ experiential ” divine. From him
they would learn how beil to put their faith into
practice; and, daily drinking at the fountain of his
enthusiasm, they would grow ftrong to brush aside any
doubt or despondency the Devil might whisper to
their hearts.

But who was this prophet to be ? Where should
they go ? Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire ? Rivaulx
in Yorkshire ? Cowper earneftly canvassed the question
with his more senous correspondents. Aftually it
was settled by the prophet himself. One day, not
long after Mr. Unwin’s death, there arrived atthe house
an Evangelical clergyman called Newton, who said
that he had been recommended to call by a friend of
Mrs. Unwin, He was an odd, unclerical-looking
little man with a big nose. But he had a bright, com¬
pelling eye: and when he began to speak, it was with
a force and an animation that fairly flung them off their
feet. Thw had never met such a dynamic personality.
Within a few minutes he had taken them completely
under his wing, was advising them about their.moft
intimate concerns. And before a week was out he
had written oflFering them the alternative of three
houses, if they would come and live in his parish of
Olney in Buckinghamshire. They were not unwilling.

110

The Stricken Deer

Mrs. Unwin had found Newton sympathetic over her
husband’s death; and Cowper was dazzled by the
flaming certainty of his faith. But even if they had
been unwilling, they would have been unable to iland
up againil such a whirlwind. The only difficulty was
that all the possible houses in Olney seemed to be so’
far from the church. However, Newton brushed that
aside. He knew of one, two, three houses nearer;
and if none was available, he would always be ready to
come and hold a service in their house, wherever it
might be. He had taken a great fancy to them:
they were ju^f the type of people the place needed:
they mu^l come. And come they did. "Within three
months their belongings had been packed up and
bundled across England, and unpacked again at
Orchard Side, Olney. It was not an attraftive house.
Its tall facade of dingy brick, faced with dingier ^lone,
and crowned by a row of false Gothic battlements,
frowned down upon one “ like a prison,” thought
Cowper, as he caught sight of it, at the end of the long
Olney High Street. Its garden was only a narrow
ilripof about fifty feet by twenty, between two high walls.
All i(s rooms looked north, and it abutted on Silver
End, the wor^ di^lri£l of the place, whose sordid
jollities were a constant offence to Cowper’s simple but
fa^idious taste. However, it was near the church, and
it was near Newton. You had only to open the gate at
the end of the garden, and cross a bit of orchard, and
there you were, looking in at the white-painted sash
windows at the back of the Vicarage, ftill spick and
fresh as a doll’s house, for it had been built for Newton
by his patron. Lord Dartmouth, only three years before.
For the reft, Cowper did not take much to Olney;
and never did, though he lived there twenty years. If
it was at all like it is now, one can underftand it. It is
a typical small country town, with a long, ftraggling
High Street and an avenue down the middle of

Ill

Life oj Cow'per

it» a bow-windowed inn, and a roomy, Decorated
church. But it lacks the cheerful charm associated
with such places: its Afreets are ftagnant, but not
peaceful. On the other hand, Cowper loved the
country around. To us it seems much of a piece with
the town : tame and trivial, a network of villages and
fields, neither flat nor hilly, devoid of distances. But
it reminded Cowper of Berkham^led ; it had the same
leafy hedgerows and thatched cottages half buried in
trees, the same atmosphere of green, domefticated
peace. And the landscape of Berkham^led, the firft
ne had ever admired, was ^ill the moft beautiful in
the world to him. As he gazed pensively south, across
the sleepy Ouse towards Hertfordshire, the memory
of other days would flood his mind, a thousand forgotten
incidents would ilart before his eyes, and he would
feel at home.

Not that he had much time for such unprofitable
musings. His life was a very much more ftrenuous
affair now than it had been at Huntingdon. For it
was dominated by the extraordinary man who had
brought him there. In his later years the Reverend
John Newton published, for the edification of his fellow
Evangelicals, an account of his life, entitled An
Authentic Narrative of some Interesting Particulars in the
Life of John Newton. It is a fu^ly, forbidding little
book, and more than half of it is pious platitude ; but
it enshrines within its lilted sentences one of the mo^l
fantastic fairy tales that was ever the true ftory of a
human being.

John Newton was born in London in 1725, the son
of a shipmaster. Even as a child he showed himself
possessed of a superSlitious, inflammable imagination,
and a boiling, dynamic energy, always reSllessly search¬
ing for an objeft on which to expend itself. His
mother, an old-fashioned Puritan, wished him to
become a clergyman, and for the firSl few years of his

The Stricken Deer

112

life his mind was forced to concentrate itself on religion.
From time to time he would be seized with a fit of
violent devotion. Once, at the age of fifteen, he was
so excited by Beattie’s Church History that for three
months he would not eat any meat, and hardly opened
his mouth, for fear of letting fall one of those idle words
for which he would have to give account on the La^f
Day. However, his mother died. And with adoles¬
cence his virile nature began to read^ again^ the ideas
to which he had been brought up. He was incapable
of doing anything by halves; and he became a militant
atheift. His father had sent him to sea; he threw
himself with gufto into the rioting, buccaneering
life of the eighteenth-century sailor, and especially
took a fierce delight in blaspheming again^ the
God he had so lately scrupulously honoured. From
time to time, indeed, the conviftions of his child¬
hood would reassert themselves, and visit him in
mysterious Stirrings of conscience. Once, for example,
he had a curious dream. It seemed to him that his
ship was riding at anchor for the night in the harbour
of Venice, where he had lately touched : the exquisite,
worthless Venice of Longhi and Goldoni, a ^ange
setting for the sombre fantasies of his Nordic imagina¬
tion. It was his watch on deck, and as he Stood gazing
across the inky waters of the lagoon to where, on the
lighted piazzetta, contessa and cisisbeo Stepped masked
from their gondolas to revel at the Ridotto, a Stranger
came up to him and gave him a rin|, which he implored
him not to lose, as he valued his life. This Stranger
was followed by another, who as eloquently adjured
him to throw the ring away. And he dropped it over¬
board. Immediately the spires of Venice were lit up
with a lurid glare; behind them the Euganean hills
burSt into flame; and his tempter, turning on him
with an expression of triumph, told him that they were
lit for his deStru^on. But at this moment a third

113 Life of Cowper

Granger appeared. As he stepped on board the flames
died away; and he drew the ring from the water, but
would not give it back to Newton, saying, with a
solemn emphasis, that he should have it at some future
time. Shuddering with terror he awoke. The dream
seemed to him a parable of his own spiritual life : the
ring his salvation, the second Granger the power of evil.
He could not get the dream out of his head.

However, it could not for long divert his mind from
following its natural course. Already, indeed, it was
dominated by a very different theme. His turbulent
spirit found it hard to settle to any job, and about a year
before he had got a new appointment on a ship bound
for Jamaica. A few days before it sailed he went to
pay a visit of courtesy on some people called Catlett,
to whom his father had given him an introduftion.
He had hardly been in the house an hour before he
had fallen in love with Miss Catlett—a girl of fourteen.
His love was of a piece with his religion and his
infidelity—a flaming, tearing, devouring passion that
burned itself into the very marrow of his being. For
the moment time ceased to exi^l. His ship was due
to sail in a few days ; and he let it sail, while he sat day
after day with his eyes fixed, as in a trance, on the objeft
of his adoration. And when at laft he did go to sea,
it was only to dream of Miss Catlett, and work with
frenzied energy in order to make enough money to
marry her. But now a succession of disasters began to
overtake him. Recklessly lounging on Harwich Dock
in his sailor’s check shirt, he was caught by the press-
gang. His vitality enabled him to support his new
condition with tolerable ease and cheerfulness. He
sopn became a midshipman, and he met a fellow-
officer who supplied him with many useful new argu¬
ments againft the existence of God. But when his
ship was ordered to New Guinea and he was faced with
the prospeft of not seeing Miss Catlett for five years,

I

The Stricken Deer

114

he deserted. He was caught, brought back in irons,
and, ia accordance with the savage penal code of the
day, publicly stripped, flogged and degraded to the
position of a common seaman. His rage knew no
bounds. It was agony to one of his nature to obey
when he had once commanded, and he felt he had loft
his love for ever. He used to lie for hours, as the ship
made its way through the calm tropical waters, brood¬
ing on his wrongs, till he was half mad. Sometimes
he would decide to kill himself, sometimes the captain
who had misused him, sometimes both. But always
before he afted the figure of his love, all the lovelier by
contraft with his present circumftances, would ftart
before him; his heart would be flooded with a softer
emotion ; and he would ftay his hand.

At laft, after weary months, he arrived at Madeira,
where he got exchanged on to another ship. His new
captain was kind to him. But Nfewton was now so
desperate that he became quite unmanageable, insub¬
ordinate to superiors, and given up to every vice.
When they reached the Platane Islands on the weft
coaft of Africa, he left the ship and took service with
a planter. One would have thought it impossible
that he should go through anything much worse than
he had already. But he did. His mafter had a black
miftress, who took a violent dislike to Newton. For
two years he was treated more harshly than the meaneft
native slave, under-clothed and under-fed and over¬
worked. An attack of tropical fever, during which he
lay untended on the floor without even water to drink,
was the final- blow. He became like an animal,
dumb and resigned, incapable of thought or emotion,
or anything but a blind luft to satisfy the wants of
nature. Only, now and again, memories of his early
education would ftumble into his numbed brain. He
had somehow managed to keep a tattered geometry in
his pocket through all his adventirres, and he would

115 Lije of Cowper

ftcal out by night, half-naked skeleton as he was, and
with its help laboriously trace arcs and triangles on the
sand in the brilliant light of the African moon. After
a year he got away, and became foreman for another
planter in the neighbouring islands of the Bananoes.
Here his life was supportable save for an occasional
pang of regret for Miss Catlett. Such letters as he
had written home had brought no reply. And he had
given up all hope of getting back. He began more
and more to live like the natives, gradually acquiring
their habits and superstitions, so that he dared not allow
himself to sleep once the moon was above the fronded
palm trees. However, after two years and a half, a
ship arrived from England with a letter from his father
asking him to come home. His firSt inSlinft was to
refuse. But the thought that he might see Miss
Catlett again, though he now had little hope of marry¬
ing her, caused him to change his mind.

Newton was now very different from the Sformy boy
who had sailed from Torbay five years before. His
conversation was Still reckless and bitter and profane;
so much so, indeed, that the horrified captain or the ship
on which he travelled home began to fear it would
bring a judgment on the ship. But the suffering
Newton had undergone had left him with a disguSt for
the world. Its prizes no longer inspired his ambition,
nor its pleasures his desires. Had he not followed the
call of his passions wherever they had led him } And
what had he got from them but bitterness and misery ?
But he could not resign himself to inactivity. His
dynamic energy Ctill boiled within him, seeking an
outlet. He could not find it in worldly ambition or
worldly emoyment. Was there nothing more stable,
more satisfying ? Insensibly his mind began to revert
for guidance to the beliefs implanted in it in infancy.
A moment of danger brought it to the point of decision.
Soon after the ship had left Newfoundland a violent

The Stricken Deer 116

^orm got up, and within a few hours the upper timbers
of the ship were torn away, and it was flooded with
water. Provisions, cargo, and some men were loil,
and during two days everybody worked at the pumps.
For a time they seemed to be doing no good. With a
thrill of fear Newton realized he was probably going to
die. “ If this will not do,” he exclaimed unthinkingly,
“ the Lord have mercy on us.” The true significance
of his words suddenly came home to him. He
thought, “ If He really exifts there will be very little
mercy for me.” In that moment of terrible crisis the
whole of his paft life moved in vivjd review before him,
and it ftruck him with overwhelming force that of all the
objefts that had in turn commanded his allegiance,
now, at the point of death, only the religion of his
childhood retained any value in his eyes. It alone had
not proved worthless or unattainable: all his sorrows
might be dated from the time that he deserted it. He
resolved if he were saved to devote the reft of his life
to it. He was saved, and for the laft few days of
the voyage began to put his resolution into praftice.
He could not, indeed, feel a lively faith in Chriftianity \
but he was convinced that such a faith alone had the
slighteft chance of giving him permanent happiness.
And he hoped that, by consiftentfy living in accordance
with Chriftian precept, he might obtain it.

He arrived in England to find his father away on a
voyage. But he had made arrangements with a ship¬
owner friend of his to offer Newton a job firft as mate,
and then as-captain, on a line of ships trading in slaves;
so that his future was assured. More pleasing ftill,
he found Miss Catlett ftill unmarried and ftill conftant.
And after his second voyage they were married. In
the excitement induced by ^1 these events he tended to
forget his pious resolutions, though he ftill meant to
keep them. But on one of his expeditions he saw a
young man, an infidel juft as he had been, dying in

117 Lije of Cowper

terrible circum^lances, friendless in Africa. The fear
of death and the terrors of his conscience revived again.
A dangerous illness at sea a few months after this finally
awakened him from his inertia; and from this time on
he entered on a life of rigid Study and devotion. Every
moment of his day was devoted to some useful employ¬
ment, and such time as he could spare from his profession
and his religion he occupied in teaching himself
Latin from a pocket Horace. It muSt have been a
curious scene—the ship moving with sails and rigging
aslant again^l the ^lars, among the mysterious islands
of that equatorial ocean, while the human cargo packed
together in the hold sweltered below, and above, the
captain paced the deck murmuring to himself the
compaft urbanities of Horace.

He persevered in this life for five or six years, but
without achieving real satisfaftion. The fail was
that eighteenth-century orthodoxy did not appeal to
his imagination, and so could not become that soul¬
absorbing passion that to his temperament was a
necessary condition of happiness. His present religion
regulated his life and saved him from the worSt suffer¬
ings into which he had been led by his infidelity. But
what he wanted was a doftrine that would demand the
absolute surrender of every energy of his mind and
body. One evening in 1754 when his ship was at
anchor in the port ot St. Chri^opher he came across a
Captain Clunie, who told him about Evangelicalism.
Berore the evening was out Newton had given himself
up to this new creed as he had to his love for Miss
Catlett. Here was the religion he wanted—a creed
that spoke to the heart, that commanded the undivided
allegiance of the whole personality, that fired the
imagination and gave scope to the desire for adlion.
It was the turning-point of his life. He had found
what he had been looking for ever since he was ten
years old. For the remaining forty years of his life

The Stricken Deer 118

every thought, feeling and adtion was dedicated,
without a faltering, to the faith of his choice. His life
on board ship took on the ascetic rigour of a Trappift
monaftery. Every moment he was not working or
sleeping he spent in prayer or reading the Bible, or
inilrufting his crew in religion. His Latin studies
were laid aside as useless frivolities. If he had female
slaves on board he ate no meat, for fear it might
ftrengthen his flesh to luft after them. After a time
he made up his mind to give up his profession; not,
oddly enough, because he thought slavery wrong, but
because it was too interefting: it made him think too
much about secular subjefts. For five years he was a
tide surveyor at Liverpool, where he continued his
religious studies, and where he managed to get to know
Whitefield and Wesley and other Evangelical leaders.
Then in 1758 he decided to take orders. But here
was a difficulty. He was not at all the sort of man
who appealed to a Georgian bishop. Not only was he
enthusiastic, and not quite a gentleman, but it was
rumoured that he thought a Nonconformist had as good
a chance of heaven as a member of the Established
Church of England. Every bishop he asked
refused to ordain him. Irritated at the rebuffs he
received, Newton had thoughts of becoming a Congre-
gationaliSl minister. But Lord Dartmouth, the good
angel of Evangelicalism, Stepped in, procured his
ordination, and himself presented him to the living of
Olney. Conversion had given Ne\^ton incentive,
ordination gave him scope. All that virile vitality
that had carried* him triumphant through so many
changes of fortune, that had enabled him to endure
slavery, defeat sickness, and defy the Navy of England,
now poured itself with irresistible force into the avoca¬
tions of an Evangelical minister. He preached, taught,
visited, held prayer meetings; he wrote hymns and
pamphlets; even began a hi Story of the whole world

119 Life of Cowper

since the Creation, from the Evangelical point of view,
in order to combat the subversive interpretations of
Gibbon' and Hume. But his moSt charafteriftic
adlivity was his religious letters. All over England,
with people of every sort—soldiers, politicians, school-
mafters, young ladies—Newton kept up a voluminous
correspondence, in which he advised them about every
detail of their moral and spiritual lives. His advice
was always long and generally impassioned ; and when,
as sometimes happened, it was given unasked, it was
not well received. But on the converted it made a
tremendous impression. And by the time he met
Cowper, Olney was already one of the centres of the
Evangelical world.

His charafter is sufficiently shown forth by his
^lory. He was primarily a man of aftion. If he
thought he should do a thing he did it; and he often
did it without thinking about it at all. Nor did
thought mean anything to him except in so far as it
told him how to aft. He was incapable of speculation
or self-analysis. Reason was to him a weapon which
he used, not very effeftively, to confute his opponents.
His own afts and opinion were directed not by reason,
but by unanalyzed inftinft. He became an atheift
because his inftinft reacted against religion, and when
inftinft demanded religion again he threw his atheism
overboard without even bothering to find replies to
those arguments he had thought so formidable when
his inftinft had been on their side.

Yet he was not at all ftupid. No one whose brain
was not a ftrong inftrument could have taught himself
Latin on a ship with nothing to help him but a copy of
Horace, and anything he took up, whether navigating
or preaching or writing, he did well. But over and
above all this, he had imagination. It is this quality
that differentiates his narrative from those truthful
fiftions of Defoe which it so much resembles in its

The Stricken Deer

I 20

outward incidents—adventures, escapes^ and sudden
vicissitudes. No one could be less like the business¬
like heroes of Defoe, with their matter-of-faft love
affairs, their unshakeable nerve, and the British com¬
mon sense with which they confronted the mo^
unlikely situations, than this passionate, super^itious
creature who was guided in the mo^ momentous
decisions by omens and prophetic dreams; who
trembled before the baleful influence of the African
moon; and was upheld through the blackest mis¬
fortunes, and prevented from committing appalling
crimes, by the memory of a girl of sixteen whom he was
convinced he would never see again. He was extra¬
ordinarily sensitive to the influence of Nature; he
found in later life that only from country solitudes
could his soul soar easily to heights of spiritual
eeftasy. His letters, too, crude and absurd as they
are, are full of flights of naive fancy, touches of
beauty, humour and intimacy, only possible to a man
of imagination.

Nor was this out of keeping with his whole charafter.
The imagination is a thing of inilinft rather than of
reason, and often men of aftion have more of it than
men of thought. Hobbes had less imagination than
Cromwell, Luther more than Erasmus. Newton,
indeed, had more in common with these heroes of the
Reformation than with his own contemporaries. Like
theirs, his character was heroic and unsymmetrical,
freaked with a Gothic quaintness, milled with a Gothic
sublimity. He had their faults, too. He was narrow
and uncouth; he was not moulded of fine clay. He
could hardly have survived such a life if he had been;
and in so far as he was not like Luther, he was the
eighteenth-century sailor he looked, clumsy, careless
and insensitive. His kindness was generally taiflless,
and his piety sometimes profane.

But all these qualities, good and bad, remarkable

I2I

Lijc oj Ccnvper

or commonplace, were subservient to the single one
of fanaticism. His whole life was a succession of
slaveries to successive single ideas. Now he was con¬
vinced that his own particular brand of religion was the
be^l thing for anyone, anywhere, in any circumftances.
His every word, whether serious or cheerful, trivial
or important, whether it was connected with people or
politics or gardening, was made to refer to religion.
His very jokes were Evangelical. This exclusive
devotion was bound up with the ^Irongeft sides of his
charafter—his will, his passion, his imagination, his
faith. He would have given his life for his beliefs,
without a thought. But exclusiveness is also respon¬
sible for his defefts. He carried out the precepts of his
creed so literally as to be at times both indecent and
ridiculous. “ Good news indeed,*^ he remarked, with
conscientious joviality, on hearing of his favourite
niece’s translation to another world. It might sound
heartless, but it was Evangelical, and therefore muft
be right. Again, whatever could not be by any means
forced into connexion with his religion muft necessarily
be of the devil. If there is any practice in the land
sinful,” he exclaimed, “ then attendance at the theatre
is so.” And all he could see in the graceful sym¬
bolism of Venice’s Marriage to the Sea was ” a lying,
antiquated Popish Bull.”

It is difficult to talk long about one subjeft without
becoming boring. And Newton often did. He would
have given his life to save your soul; but nothing
could persuade him not to thrust his views down your
throat. He tended to become arrogant. There was
only one God, and John Newton was His prophet. So
that though he was always repeating that he was sinful,
he never admitted he was wrong. It was impossible
to argue with him. If anyone asked Newton to
explain a contradiftidn in his argument, he merely
looked at him with the dreadful, glassy good-nature of

The Stricken Deer

122

the fanatic, forgave him for his error, and went on with
his exhortation.

With such a man as his spiritual direftor, it was not
odd that Cowper had little time to himself. Newton
had made Olney a whirlwind of Evangelical activity.
When he was not preaching—and he was sometimes
in the pulpit for six hours a day—he was visiting the
sick, or giving Bible lessons to the children, or holding
a joint service with the Dissenters, or leading an
extempore prayer meeting in the Great House, a large,
empty barrack of a place, opposite the Vicarage. Into
the mid^l of this whirlwind Cowper was caught up.
He had to leave his monaftery and come forth into the
world, a preaching missionary friar. No more of those
placid walks after tea with Mrs. Unwin. Dinner was
at one and tea at four, and after that sermon or lefture
till bed. Cowper did not objeft to the change in his
life. His spirit was irresistibly drawn to Newton’s
buoyant vitality, as it had been to the calm certainty of
Mrs. Unwin. He spent eight hours of every day in
Newton’s company; prayed with him; with him
attended the bedside of the sick and dying ; rode and
walked by his side through the lanes, when he went to
preach at a neighbouring village. Newton gave him
some work of his own to do, too. He visited the poor
and he taught in Sunday School.

Such work was easy to him. His kindly nature had
always gone out to children ; and he had a simple and
diffident sympathy which made all the people he visited
love him. It was a very different thing when Newton
asked him to lead in prayer. His conversion had not
cured him of that morbid horror of making a public
exhibition of himself which had occasioned his firil
madness. When he firil went to Huntingdon he had
thought of becoming a clergyman, and then given it
up because he could not face the publicity it would
entail. And when, after Mr. Unwin’s death, he had

123 Lije oj Cowper

been asked to lead the day’s prayer for the family
and their two servants, he had almoft broken down.
“ I was so troubled at the apprehension of it,” he
wrote, “ and so dreadfully concerned at the conflift I
suftained on this occasion that my health was not a
little affedled thereby.” But this new task was far
harder. In front of a number of people whom he did
not know and who might not be in sympathy with him
at all, he was required to lay bare all that was moSt
sacred and moil painful in his exiilence, and to speak
as he was used only to speak in his bedroom alone.
His whole being recoiled from the thought. How¬
ever, Newton would not liilen to such morbid hesita¬
tions for a moment. And, indeed, Cowper himself
thought it only another sign of his uncontrollable
weakness and vanity. Was he, juil because it em¬
barrassed him to do so, to withhold from others, less
fortunate than himself, the encouragement they might
gain from the glorious testimony of his conversion ?
With set face he nerved himself to the task. For four
or five hours before service began he would sit shaking
with nerves. Then, in that barrack-like room, with
the lines of decent cottage people composed in respeft-
ful attention before him, and the summer dusk falling
on the fields outside, he would begin to speak. The
firft sentences came toneless and halting; but he
gathered strength as he went on. And soon he had
forgotten his fears, forgotten his audience, forgotten
everything, save that he was trying, wretched, helpless
creature as he was, to convey something of his gratitude
to the compassionate Saviour who raised him from the
depths of hell, to tell Him how exclusively, how
desperately, he put his truSt in Him. The worn
sensitive features grew tense with an unearthly
enthusiasm, an uncontrollable emotion began to throb
in the quiet, educated voice. It seemed to the people
sitting round as if they were liilening unseen to some

The Stricken Deer 124

inconceivablyholy, inconceivably intimate conversation,
as if Cowper really saw his Lord in the room with him,
and saw no one else. And they were moved as they
had never been moved by the glib emotionalism of the
professional Evangelical preacher. “ I have heard
many men preach,” said an old villager years later,
“ but I have never heard anyone preach like Mr.
Cowper.”

Outside his religious activities his days pursued the
same unvaried course they had at Huntingdon. It was
a sensational event, for instance, when he and Mrs.
Unwin had to cross the street to spend a few weeks at
” The Bull ” because one of their servants was ill with
smallpox. One cannot well imagine a sleepier little
country inn than “ The Bull ”; but to Olney it repre¬
sented the very epitome of worldly rush and frivolity.
” What can you both do at the Bull,” wrote Newton,
” surrounded with noise and nonsense every night
But,” he adds with pious jocularity, “ may the Lord
preserve and comfort you in the midil of bulls and
bears.” Life was also varied by the ftream of Evaii-
gelical men and visitors who were always coming and
going at the Vicarage. Mr. Venn came, and Mr.
Berridge, and Lord Dartmouth ; and on one occasion,
formidable thought, thirteen Baptift ministers at once.
Cowper’s heart leapt up when he saw them all seated
round Newton’s dining-room table. ” It was a
comfortable sight,” he exclaims, ” to see thirteen
Gospel minivers together.” On another evening he
sat watching the candlelight playing on the aullere
countenance and glittering regimentals of Captain
Scott, “ the pious captain,” who had come over to
spend the night with Newton in order to avoid the
races at Northampton.

But moft of the glimpses of Cowper’s life which we
get at this period reveal him occupied in the recurring
avocations of every week, picking his way to early

125 9f Gowper

service by the light of a lantern in the chill murk of a
November morning, while Mrs. Unwin clattered on
pattens at his side; or at Evensong, in the AuguAan
gallery lately fitted on to the Perpendicular columns of
the church in order to accommodate more worshippers,
listening to Newton praying with ardour for “ my
maid Molly, who is troubled on the point of election.”
Newton’s servants were not the only ones whose
spiritual condition gave cause for anxiety. Cowper
and Mrs. Unwin had a great deal of trouble in that
way. When they had nrft arrived at Olney their
household had consi^ed of a man and a maid, both, as
they thought, in a happy ^late of grace. But the maid
early began to show signs of backsliding, and before
long behaved in such a dreadful manner that they
began to doubt whether she had ever really been con¬
verted at all. She left in a hurry. Her successor was
respeftable, but grossly incompetent, and after Mrs.
Unwin had given her some “ pious advice ” she went
too. Finally they fell back on a young woman from
Olney, who, though religious, suffered from very poor
health. Cowper could only hope that “ as the Lord
had designed her to the work He would give her
strength equal to it.”

So passed 1767, 1768, 1769. But though the
outward circum^ances of his life were ;so calm,
Cowper’s mind was once again the scene of a terrible
crisis. Gradually, relentlessly, with gathering speed
and momentum, that faith which had signalized his
firil recovery from madness, and upon which he had
re^ed the whole structure of his subsequent life, was
slipping away from him. The spell was breaking;
the bridge was ceasing to bear; the single flame of his
life’s happiness was nickering to extin«ion. Indeed,
it was a wonder that it lingered so long. For the
method by which he attempted to keep it alive was
radically defective: his ideal of religious life was

126

TAe Stricken Deer

a practical impossibility. Mortality is the firft
law of man’s exigence on this planet. Nor is his
ceftasy exempt from its tragic jurisdiftion. A breath
of the Divine Spirit induced by love or art or prayer,
suddenly it blows upon him ; for a brief space of time
he is swept up ana borne along by the wind of its
going; then he flags and falls back exhaufted. It is
beyond the power of his earth-bound spirit to sustain
such an ethereal intensity of emotion for more than
a moment: and such moments visit the moft in¬
spired of mankind only once or twice in a lifetime.
Any system of life, therefore, which aims at constantly
maintaining them muSl necessarily fail. But moSl of
all one like Cowper’s, which tries to do so by deliber¬
ately refusing to allow the mind to dwell on anything
else. An emotion cannot be induced by an intelieftual
effort; and, besides, the same emotion cannot be
roused often by the same Stimulus. The mind is
numbed by familiarity. One soon becomes used to the
colouring of a room, however Striking; the change of
key that sent a thrill down the spine like a douche of
cold water on firSt hearing becomes a mere insignificant
noise if it is often repeated- So the unvarying round
of Cowper’s existence, inStead of maintaining his
emotional State, hastened its departure. The regular
sequence of prayer and meditation ceased to Stir him
juSt because it was regular. He was trying to do an
impossible thing, and he was trying to do it in the way
that of all others would fail the sooneSt. Of course, it
was partly the fault of the Evangelical creed, which, as
we have seen, made an emotional condition into a
moral virtue. But its average adherents did not in
practice carry this doftrine to a logical conclusion:
the pressure of ordinary life was too Strong to allow
them to think about their souls all the time. So their
emotions were often refreshed by new Stimuli. It
only shows the Strength of the original experience, that,

127 Lije oj Cowper

concentrating exclusively on it, Cowper should have felt
its eflfeft for as long as he did. But it could not la^l for
ever; and already before he left Huntingdon a change in
his feelings had appeared. He began to notice periods
of spiritual stagnation within himself, during which the
things that had moSl moved him in the days of his
conversion Stirred no response at all. He could not
keep his attention on the passages of the Bible he loved
beSt; prayers that he had once not been able to say
with a Steady voice, so exactly did they express the
moSt poignant and intimate experiences of his life,
hymns in which he had been used to pour forth his
whole soul in thanksgiving, now slipped from his
lips almost without his realizing what he was doing.
The great phrases of Evangelicalism, Election, Repro¬
bation, Final Perseverance, the very sound of which
had been enough two years before to thrill him like
the sound of a trumpet, were now so dulled by repeti¬
tion as hardly to convey any idea at all. “ Oh, that I
retained my firSt love,’' he said sadly to Mrs. Madan,
“ that it was with me as when I firSt came forth from
the furnace, when the name of Jesu was like honey and
milk upon my tongue and the very sound of it was
sufficient to suSlain and comfort me.”

These periods of lethargy did not laSf long. But
they were distressing while they laSted ; and he had
never known them before. What could be the cause
of them 'i Perhaps God wished to save him from the
danger of being over-confident; or perhaps He was
trying his faith. All the saints had trials. He hoped
this was the cause, not any fault of his own, and that he
would be able to Stand the teSt, If he did, perhaps
the periods of lethargy would Stop. But though he
made every effort, they went on. He welcomed the
change to Olney with enthusiasm. A new home under
the personal supervision of one of the burning and
shining lights of the Gospel, might prove juSt what was

The Stricken Deer

128

needed to make his troubles dis^pear. For a few
months his hopes were fulfilled. The change of scene
and life was a stimulus. His new work gave him too
much to do and too much to think about to allow
him to worry about himself; while his whole spirit
was revived by the impaft of Newton’s personality.
He became confident, hopeful; at moments he knew
again the religious ecstasy of two years before. But
it was not quite the same ec^asy: he had become self-
conscious about it. No longer did it Hood his mind,
compelling and unbidden, carrying him away whether
he would or no. He watched for the leaft sign of it,
tended it, savoured it to the la^ drop, and when it was
gone lingered over its memory—sole witness in a
drab world to the living reality of his salvation. Nor
was it induced, as before, regularly by the regular
incidents of his religious life; but capriciously, by
some chance accident—a detail in a service, a phrase
in a book hitherto unnoticed, which brought the truth
home to him afresh by suddenly presenting it from
a new angle.

“ The Lord has dealt graciously with me since I
came, and I truft I have in two in^ances had much
delightful communication with Him. Yet this
opportunity of access was intimated to me in such a
way as to teach me at the same time His great care
that I might not turn it to m^^ prejudice. I expected
that in some sermon or exposition I should find Him,
that the lips of His excellent miniver would be the
instrument by which the Lord would work upon and
soften my obdurate heart, but He saw my proneness to
praise the creature more than the Creator, and though
therefore He gave me the thing I hoped for, yet He
conveyed it to me in a way which I did not look to.
On the laSl Sabbath morning, at a prayer meeting
before service, while the poor folks were singing a
hymn and my vile thoughts were rambling to the ends

129 Lije oj Cowper

of the earth, a single sentence—‘ And is there no pity
in Jesus’ breaft ? —seized my attention at once, and
my heart within me seemed to return answer, ‘ Yes, or
I had never been there.’ The sweetness of this visit
ladled almost through the day, and I was once more
enabled to weep under a sense of the mercy of God in
Jesus. On Thursday morning I attended a meeting
of children, and found that passage ‘ Out of the mouths
of babes and sucklings ’ haft thou ordained praise,
verified in a sense I little thought of, for at almoft every
word they spoke in answer to the several queftions
proposed to them my heart burned within me and
melted into tears of gratitude and love.”

In these moments all the old confidence returned,
and he upbraided himself for his inability to endure the
smalleft trial with unfaltering heart. But he could
not feel this confidence long. It was induced by
change of scene and society, and when he got accus¬
tomed to this change it went. The faft was that he was
” through ” with Evangelicalism. Its appeal to him
had been a purely emotional one, and his emotion had
ceased to respond to that kind of appeal. As we have
seen, the quickening of the spirit that had attended his
firft arrival at Olney was never able to reawaken his
response to those expressions of his religion which he
was already bored with. It could only ftir him to
respond to some aspeft of it he had not noticed before.
And this response was pale, flickering, premeditated,
compared with the soul-shaking thrill of his firft
vision. Within a few months of his arrival at. Olney
all the old disquieting symptoms began to reappear.
When he tried to say his prayers he could not keep his
mind on what he was doing: after a few moments he
would suddenly recolleft himself, and then, in a second
revulsion of feeling, he would upbraid himself for his
lack of truft in God’s mercy. He had loved to medi¬
tate on his solitary walks—the sights and scenes of the

K

The Stricken Deer

130

country, which were what he thought moft lovely in
the world of sense, combined with the thought of that
Gospel which was what he thought moft lovely in the
world of spirit, to soothe his soul in a celeftial harmony.
Now he could not concentrate on the Gospel at all,
except to think how little gratitude he felt for it. How
he had loved, in the old days at Dr. Cotton’s, with
lighted eye and flushed face, to detail the ^lor)' of his
conversion to anyone who could be brought to listen !
Now, the moment religion was mentioned in conversa¬
tion he found his attention begin to wander; and if
Newton asked him to tell his ^fory to hearten up some
fellow Chriilian, he felt nothing out a dull nausea at
having to say it all over again. Writing about it be¬
came as bad as talking. Minutes would pass as he sat,
the ink drying on his pen, trying in vain to work him¬
self up into the ^late of mind in which he could deliver
a comfortable religious homily to Mrs. Cowper or
Mrs. Madan. And then he would suddenly remember
how, two years ago, his pen would have been too slow
to keep pace with the flowing tide of his thought:
once more a sense of guilt would strike him, and he
would lay his letter aside. He could not bear to fall
below the ^andard he had set himself then—to do so
would be equivalent to a confession of his own decline
—so he gradually ceased to write at all.

Sunday, too, became intolerable to him. In the
old days he used to look forward to it as the climax of
the week’s devotion, the day in which, undi^frafted by
worldly care, he could give himself up to thoughts
of God. Now he felt it as the climax of nothing but
his own inadequacy, a day in which nothing was
allowed to diilraft him from realizing what a milure
his religious life was. The twenty-four hours passed
like twenty-four days. That spent in church was the
mo^f unendurable. When he firft came to Olney
Newton’s influence had revived his enjoyment of it;

131 Lift of Cowper

but soon it was as little comfort as anything else. He
knelt, and bowed, and sang, and responded, as the
service demanded, but the words had no more signific¬
ance to him than if they had been in Sanskrit. His eye
roved listlessly round the congregation, all, as he
thought, uplifted in an ecSlasy of devotion. But no
longer, as on that firSt Sunday at Huntingdon, did his
spirit rise with theirs. Indeed, the contract between
their feeling and his own only made his depression
worse. Not only was his spiritual life a failure—it
was a far greater failure than that of anyone else.

Prayer, meditation, conversation, correspondence,
church, one by one the doors through which the light
of salvation had penetrated to his heart were shut
againSl him. But it was not without a druggie.
Desperately, assiduously, with every art and energy
of which his nature was capable, he did battle with his
fears and his boredom, tried to find reassuring relief
for his dark moments, cried shame upon himself for
succumbing to them so easily, adjured himself to take
heart once more. Perhaps, he would ftill comfort
himself, his faith was being put to the teft: he was
required by an all-wise Providence “ to walk through
a romantic scene with mountains, deep and dark valleys,
caves and dens ” .i* Or perhaps he was guilty of some
secret sin and was now suflFering its punishment.
Could it he that he had been spiritually proud, con¬
vinced that he was immune from temptation ? Or had
he not trufted wholly in God, but relied on his own
good works to save him ? If he really examined
himself, unburdened himself of his sins, his troubles
would probably disappear. • And he muft always
remember that his own troubles were trivial compared
with those that Christ had undergone for his sake. He
set to work diligently to examine his smalleil action
and thought for a sign of worldliness or vanity, cut
himself off more rigorously than before from any

The Stricken Deer

132

intercuts that might turn his mind from the narrow

E ath. He spent hours on his knees, driving to get
is soul into a proper ^late of contrition. It was in
vain: his depression did not disappear. His mind
was so dazed with self-analysis and self-torment that
he hardly knew if he was contrite or not. He hoped
God did. Not for a moment could he revive the
faintest glimmer of his old ecftasy, not for the briefest
infant did his heart glow with the old love, burn with
the old faith. He could only pray to God for help;
but the help did not come. He began to wonder if it
was ever coming at all. He had done all he could,
and to what purpose ? Push, coax, wedge as he might,
one by one the doors creaked on their hinges, swung
to, shut. Without confidence, he resigned himself to
God’s mercy. He was His own interpreter, and he
must make it plain.

Now an event happened which removed his la^l
resi^ance.

Cowper had not seen much of his brother during the
la^t few years. They had long ago agreed not to
argue about religion; but as William did not really
care to talk about anything else, such an agreement
prevented them from taking much pleasure in each
other’s society. Since he had been at Olney he had
aftually only been over to Cambridge once, when
John was ill. And then, terrible to relate, he had found
his counterpane littered with plays. John came more
regularly to Olney; but his visits were far from being
an unmixed pleasure. William felt he ought not to let
them interfere with his Evangelical duties, but it
embarrassed him to perform them if he felt John was
sitting by disapproving. Besides, since John was a
clergyman it mi^ht hurt his feelings if he were not
asked to take family prayers. And yet, since he was not
converted, this was impossible. It was all very up¬
setting. John, for his part, carefully conformed to

133 Lije oj Coioper

the habits of the house, and avoided all controversial
topics. But one trembles to think what his decorous
academic mind muft have thought of a household
whose time was divided between irregular piety and
unrestrained philanthropy; where maSters and servants
alike were liable at any time to burSl out with intimate
revelations about the ftate of their souls ; and in which
every detail of daily life was direfted by a fanatical sea-
captain, with a passion for asking personal questions,
and without a degree. Altogether he felt it a great
relief when the time came for him to climb into the
coach and drive back to the peace and the port of
Cambridge.

But fate had decreed that, before he died, he too was
to be uprooted from the placid seclusion in which he
had loitered away his life, and pass through the fires
of heaven and hell. In March 1770 William was for
the second time summoned to Cambridge by the news
of his brother’s illness. When he arrived the doftor
told him he was dying. Under the shock all William’s
dying faith flared up once more. Loss of faith and
lethargy of spirits were alike forgotten. He only
remembered that his brother was dying, and that
unless he died in grace he was damned. He was not
yet in grace; but Providence had clearly brought
William there to save him. . And now began a Grange
drama. Day after day, night after night, cut off from
the world in that quiet college room, alone he wrestled
for the soul of the dying man, implored God to soften
his heart, himself with breaking voice urged his brother
to hearken to the Divine message. At fir^l his efforts
were vain. Daily John grew weaker : soon it would
be too late. William’s suspense grew" unbearable.
Three times in a night he would ftart up thinking he
heard a cry. Was it John’s dying groans, or the
exultant yell of fiends come to carry off his soul ? Or
was it some celeftial intimation for his own ear ?

The Stricken Deer 134

Holding his breath, he likened; and then rushed to the
bedside, and once more implored John to believe:
once more in vain. Could it be that God meant him
to fail ? But within the depths of John’s own spirit
forces were working on his side.

John Cowper’s life had followed a calmer course
than his brother’s. But his nature was very similar
—a bundle of nerves, a prey to superstitious fears,
afraid of life. And, faced for the firSl time with a real
crisis, in the shape of a dangerous illness, his true self
came to the surface. It is said that already, before he
fell ill, his composure had been ruffled by a Strange
incident. Years ago, when he was a schoolboy, a
vagrant gipsy in a tattered red military coat had told
his fortune. He foretold various events of youth, but
had said that he could see nothing for him after the age
of thirty. John had not paid much attention to his
words; but a short time before his illness, as he was
sauntering in the College garden, his eye was caught by
a red coat. Looking up, he saw, as he thought, the
very gipsy, peering at him through the gate. Before
he had time to say a word, the man had disappeared.
The sight of him brought the whole incident back into
his mind. With a thrill of fear, he realized that every
prediftion hitherto had been fulfilled. What then
could it mean, that the predidions topped at thirty }
Could it be there were no more to make, that what he
thought was the gipsy had been an apparition come to
forewarn him of his end } Any fears he may have had
were increased by his illness; and as he lay in bed
he began to review his paft in the light of approaching
death. It was a discouraging spectacle. All the
things he had cared for seemed equally valueless.
He felt that his whole view of life mu^ have been
wrong. Perhaps William’s view was the right one.
But he had had no experience that could enable him
to feel as William felt. A drab melancholy invaded

135 9 f Cowper

his spirit. And then one evening as he lay there,
suddenly, in the span of a second, the heavens opened
and the Divine Light irradiated his soul. He gave a
cry which brought William to his bedside; he clasped
Ws hand in silence, and after a little he said, “ Oh,
brother, I am full of what I could say to you.” The
nurse asked him if he needed any lavender or hartshorn.
He replied, “ None of these things will serve my pur¬
pose.” William said, “ But I know what would, my
dear, don’t IHe answered, “ You do, brother.”
At lail he had seen what William had seen. And, like
William, he had believed.

For six days more he lingered in a ^till, unearthly
ec^lasy. Only on one occasion did he reveal a trace
of his old unconverted self. It was roused by the
thought of Newton. “ I shall rejoice in a conversa¬
tion with him hereafter,” he confessed to William,
“ but I could not bear it now.” On the eighth day he
sank into a torpor, on the tenth he died.

William’s prayers had been answered. He returned
to Olney in tremulous exultation, and listened with
rapture to Newton expatiating from the pulpit on
John’s holy death. But the strain which his nervous
syftem had sustained was to prove disastrous to him*.
Alone in a Strange town, he, who had never moved a
Step from home for three years, had watched his only
brother die, himself for half the time in an agony left
he should be going to eternal perdition. He had
not even been supported by comfort from Olney.
Mrs. Unwin, for reasons unknown, had hardly
written ; and this was an added worry to Cowper, who
began to think he had offended her. While Newton
only wrote to tell Cowper, with his usual plain-spoken
trenchancy, not to deceive himself into thinking good
works could save his brother: unless he was in grace he
would certainly go to hell. The consequence was
that whatever was left of Cowper’s nervous resistance

The Stricken Deer

136

was destroyed. Within a few weeks of getting back to
Olney the fitful flame of religious emotion which had
flickered up for the laft time by John’s bedside was
extinguished •, and he found himself incapable of
making the slightest effort to recover himselr. With
mechanical lips he continued to repeat the words of
his belief, but they no longer meant anything to him.
Evangelicalism had finally and absolutely ceased to
^ir his emotions. He had drained it to its la^l drop.
He was not going to get any happiness from it ever
any more.

It was not only his religious happiness that left him.
With it went all other pleasures too. According to his
belief, religion was the only source of genuine happi¬
ness, so that if he found he had been made happy by
anything not specifically religious he was logically
forced to conneft it in some way with religion, to look
on it as a channel of the Divine Grace. The pleasant
domellic life with the Unwins was the prototype of the
corporate unity of Christians living together in faith
and charity. Natural beauty was the expression of
the Divine perfection in things sensible. As long as he
Still cared about his religion this way of looking at
things accentuated his enjoyment; for it suffused the
moSt trivial moment of pleasure with a glow of tran¬
scendental emotion. Every quiet evening by the fire,
every cowslip by the roadside, whispered to Cowper’s
spirit intimations of a blessed immortality. But when
he loSt his pleasure in religion he loSt his happiness in
these things as well. It was not only that his conscience
would not allow him to be happy if his spiritual
condition was not such as to deserve it; he could not
feel pleasure in doing anything without remembering
that m former days such a pleasure would inevitably
have culminated in a moment of religious rapture; and
the faft that it did not do so any more took away such
enjoyment as he felt. He paid the proverbial penalty

137 9f Oowper

of one who puts all his eggs into one basket. When
the basket broke, all the eggs were broken too.

The outward ordering of his life did not alter with
the change in his inner man. He taught in Sunday
School, visited, attended sermons, even said his prayers
juil as he had when he fir^l came to Olney. But the
motive that had guided his life into such a course was
dead. He went on automatically because he did not
know what else to do. His mind alternated between a
leaden lethargy and a yet more leaden gloom. Hardly
for a minute did he forget his bonds and quicken into
feeling once more. Only sometimes, as he wandered
amid the woodland solitudes, which lately had brought
such happiness to his heart, but now no longer, his
response to the beauty around him would mingle with
his memories and his sense of present misery to well
up and flow away in a gush of lyrical emotion,

‘‘ O happy shades! to me unble^l,

Friendly to peace, but not to me,

How ill the scene that offers re^,

And heart that cannot reft, agree.

This glassy ftream, that spreading pine,

Those alders quivering to the breeze,

Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine
And please, if anything could please.

But fixed unalterable care,

Foregoes not what she feels within,

Shows the same sadness everywhere,

And slights the season and the scene

For all that pleased in wood or lawn
While peace possessed these silent bowers.

Her animating smile withdrawn
Has loft its beauties and its powers.

The saint or moralift can tread
These moss-grown alleys, musing slow;

They seek, like me, the secret shade.

But not like me, to nourish woe.

The Stricken Deer 138

Me fruitful scenes and prospedls wa^c,

Alike admonish not to roam;

These tell me of enjoyments paft,

And those of sorrows yet to come.”

By a strange paradox, his frustration became for a
moment its own fulfilment, and his sorrow sighed
itself away in song. But though these sudden glory-
ings in affliftion might relieve his feelings, they did not
make him happy. For to be happy one muSt believe
in the solid Stability of what one holds valuable. And
the only thing Cowper held valuable, the pearl of great
price to obtain which he had sold all that he possessed,
had melted into air within his hand. Such an event
would have been dangerous to Cowper’s nervous syStem
at any time; for it might always cause the despond¬
ency and self-depreciation bred in him in childhood
to resume their sway over him. But it was far more
dangerous now than it would have been when he was
twenty-four. For the faith he had now loSf was the
only thing that Slood between him and definite mad¬
ness. John Cowper and Dr. Cotton had been wrong
in thinking Cowper’s religion a sign of mania. But
they were quite right in thinking that Cowper himself
was not normal. The delusions of 1763 had never
wholly left him. He would be haunted for days
together by a Grange dream. Sometimes, as when he
was agitated whether he should go and live with the
Unwins, his mind would be obsessed by some phrase
or sentence, which he took to be a message from God.
Lying in bed in the early morning—always a bad time
for neurotics—these phrases intruded themselves so
insistently on him that he thought they were spoken
by a voice. But his faith had given him control over
these spiritual disturbances. It taught him to welcome
them if he judged them to be of God, to despise them
if he judged them to be of the devil; at any rate not to
pay much attention to them, since his salvation was

139 ?/ Cowper

already decided. But now that the light of his faith
was extinguished, his inflamed fancy could make him
its slave whenever it chose. The truth was that the
fundamental cause of his madness had never been
rooted out of his mind. His conversion had neutralized
the effeft of his sense that he was singled out from the
re^l of mankind by the curse of God, but it had done
nothing to make him realize that it was the figment of
his imagination. So that when he loft his faith he was
as open to its attack as he had been in 1763. Indeed,
his ftate of mind in 1772 was that of 1763 over
again. His nervous resiftance had been sapped by
the ftrain of bereavement; he was the viftim of
visionary fears; he was disgufted with his own
spiritual condition ; and he had loft all living sense
of the value of anything. For the second time the
foundations of his sanity were undermined. Within
eighteen months he was mad for the second time.

But as he descends to his inferno, once more the
smouldering clouds rise and hide him from our sight.
Such scanty records as we possess cannot enable us to
follow the fteps of his journey. Now and again the
clouds lift, and we catch a glimpse of his face; but it
is diftorted beyond recognition by the flames of misery
and jnadness that leap around it. The aftual form
of his insanity arose, ironically enough, from that very
doftrine of salvation which he had been confident
would remove all fears from him for ever. The soul
was apprised of its salvation, he held, by a sudden
feeling of religion—felt itself to be in grace. He had
known the feeling once. But he knew it no longer;
and he was convinced that, in spite of any efforts, he
never would again. Could it therefore mean that he
had fallen from ^race, that he had forfeited his salva¬
tion ? Haftily, in horror, he brushed the idea aside.
But, do what he would, it returned, and began to eat
into his mind, till he Could think of nothing else.

The Stricken Deer 140

For the second time in his life Cowper was possessed
by the fear of his own damnation. It was inconsistent
of him, since it was one of the firSl articles of his faith
that no one could fall from grace. But Cowper's
fear was the result not of logical process, but of mental
disease; so that its inconsistency made no difference
to him. Like all mad people, he thought himself
different from anyone else in the world, and therefore
that no analogy from the life of anyone else could
apply to his. Even if it was God's usual law that no
human soul should fall from grace, yet, for some
Divine purpose of His own, God had designed his,
Cowper^s, to be of all souls ever created the one
exception. It was only too easy for him to believe
this. Did it not agree exactly with that sense that he
had been marked out from his fellows by the curse of
God which had tormented him ever since childhood }
His lethargy turned to anguish; and daily his
anguish grew blacker. Fits of despair would sweep
over him, when he would not speak or even look up,
almoft every night his sleep was broken by awful
dreams. And as always when he was agitated, he
began to hear voices. Newton and Mrs. Unwin
watched him with dismay, and did their beft to help
him. It was odd that Newton did. For his enthusiasm
for religion led him in general so far as even to look
favourably on religious mania. Once he had sent a
girl into fits by his preaching, and had refused to
express any concern, on the ground that fits might be
the means ordained by Heaven to lead her to grace.
However, he did realize that Cowper’s delusions were
due to disease; and he threw himself into the task
of curing him with the same ardour with which he threw
himself into everything else. Unfortunately, neither
nature nor circumstance had qualified him for the r 61 e
of mental alienist. He knew Cowper liked writing
verses; so, in order to di^lrad his thoughts to more

141 Life of Cowper

pleasant fields, he proposed that they should collabo¬
rate in writing some hymns “for the use of plain people,
with the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted
at all, only in a sparing form.” Cowper dutifully
carried out his part of this bleak task. Hymns are,
however, of necessity all about the Christian’s desire
for salvation and fear of damnation, and so they only
made him worry more about his soul than ever. Newton
also tried taking Cowper over to his house to divert his
mind by a bright, cheering talk, but there again he was
incapable of talking about any subjeft except religion ;
and Cowper’s mind remained undiverted. Impas¬
sioned adjuration did no good either. Newton used
to hold forth for hours about the mercy of God as they
paced up and down the leaf-ftrewn garden paths of the
Vicarage. For the time Cowper would be convinced, but
in a few hours he was as bad again as before. Newton
began to despair. “ Dear Sir Cowper was as much in
the depths as ever,” he wrote to his si^er. “ He led
me to speak la^l night from Hebrews xi. lo. I do
not think he was the better for it.” When Hebrews xi.
lo failed, what was one to do i

Mrs. Unwin’s placid firmness was far better suited
than Newton’s apoftolic zeal to deal with Cowper’s
difficulties. And, indeed, when he was feeling really
miserable, her presence was the only thing that gave
him the slighted comfort. Yet even she could only
soothe him temporarily. She did not know enough
about mental diseases in general, or Cowper’s in
particular, to do him any lading good. Aihially, poor
lady, she was, through no fault of her own, the cause
of an event that may finally have sent him off his head.
For some time pall the little household at Orchard
Side had been dwindling. Two years before William
Unwin had left to take up a living at Stock; and now
Miss Unwin became engaged to be married to a Mr.
Powley. It was a moil desirable match. For not

The Stricken Deer

142

only was he a clergyman, but he had adlually been sent
down from Oxford for holding Evangelical prayer
meetings. Nor could Cowper much regret the
departure of Miss Unwin, whose early shyness of him
had hardened into suspicion. But propriety would
not permit him to go on living with Mrs. Unwin alone.
To part was unthinkable to either; and so, in the
autumn of 1772, they agreed to marry. Can it be
that the prospect of so momentous, so intimate a change
in his life, the basic horrors of his exigence, the
thought of his mental disease, and perhaps his physical
imperfeftions, swept back into his mind and thruil
his tottering reason finally from its throne ? It does
not seem unlikely.

At any rate, from this time events moved rapidly-to
their catastrophe. On January 24, 1773, Newton was
woken at five in the morning by a messenger from Mrs.
Unwin asking him to come over to Orchard Side at
once. He hurried through the raw darkness to find
Cowper in a fit of raving madness brought on by
some peculiarly horrible dream. After some hours
the fit passed; but it recurred. And from this
time on he was treated as an invalid. He was moved
to the Vicarage, where, he had a fancy, he felt more
at ease. Doftors were sent for, and Mrs. Unwin
never left him. But not yet was he quite defeated.
In his more lucid intervals he Still clung with a
feeble, unconquerable pertinacity to the Lord who
saved him. In an awed wonder Newton listened
to him as he lay half dead on his bed, after some
frightful bout of mania, whispering with the laSt
painful breath of his spent forces that he welcomed
his sufferings, and that if he could get rid of them
by Stretching out his hand he would not do so
without God’s approval. For he knew God was
good and he truSted in Him. But he could not
hold out for ever. Another shock, the few frail

143 Cowper

strands of faith to which he 4 lill clung were torn from
his bleeding fingers and he fell headlong into the
abyss. On the night of February 24th he had a dream.
What it precisely was no one knows; but in it, amid
circumstances of unspeakable horror, he heard from the
lips of God Himself the certain and irrevocable sentence
of his damnation. The next morning the laSl veSliges
of sanity had left him. He did not know where he was
or who was speaking to him. Cowering back on his
bed in that pleasant Vicarage room, he saw only the
distorted faces of the demons, heard only the roaring
of the flames of hell open to receive him.

Once again the powers of darkness had beaten him.
Risen in the Storms of madness, in the Storms of mad¬
ness the short, Strange day of his faith had sunk to
its setting. And it has been a commonplace of subse¬
quent literary hiStory that the madness was brought
on by the faith. A commonplace, but not a truth;
Cowper’s madness finds its origin far deeper in the
sufferings of childhood, it may be in inherent physical
deficit. All his life it was hung over him. And
religion, so far from being the cause, was the moSt
considerable of the remedies by which he tried to
get rid of it. It failed. And once he realized that
it had failed, it is true that the emotional tension
encouraged by Evangelicalism, and the personal
responsibility for its own ^ate which it placed on the
individual soul, did increase Cowper’s nervous agitation
and so accelerate the advent of his madness. But
though it accelerated it, it did not make that advent
more sure.

On the contrary, it had been far nearer curing him
than any other remedy. The life of aftive interests
and cheerful social amusements so naively recom¬
mended by subsequent hiftori^ns he had tried without
any effeft; because such a life did not try to deal with
he causes of his malady at all. Of course, Evangeli-

The Stricken Deer 144

calism did not go to the root of it, for it had not the
necessary scientific knowledge; but it did face its
deeper problems. It did seek to fight the enemies of
the spirit with spiritual weapons, to expel, not merely
to evade them. And the consequence was that 1763
to 1767 was the one happy period of his mature
existence. Under the shadow of later years he would
look back and ask himself if it had not been part of
another life. In wonder he gazed at the world of
familiar things transfigured by a golden and unearthly
radiance; himself in the midll, free and fearless.

CHAPTER IV

THE CREATIVE PERIOD, I 773- 1 786

The next two years of Cowper’s life are a lurid black¬
ness, spasmodically lit up by flashes of more lurid light.
The ftrudture of his nervous system was overturned,
the coherence of his thought de^royed, as they had not
been even in 1763. It was not only that he had
succumbed a second time, and therefore of necessity
minded far more than he had the fir^. But his collapse
came as the result of a far severer shock. His fir^l
madness had been the culmination of a slow decline of
spirits from a happiness at beil but partial. This was
tne sudden and complete failure of a force in whose
ability to proteft him he had believed implicitly. All
his life he had sought such a force; at laft he
thought he had found it, and he attached himself
to it with all the unquestioning truSl he had never
been able to give to anything else. Then it collapsed.
And in proportion as it had made him happy, its
collapse made him wretched. It was as if he had been
foully betrayed by an old and beloved friend. The
bottom was knocked out of his universe. His whole
scheme of things had been turned upside down ; and
obscurely he felt that all his other values were turned
upside down with it. The one supreme good had
proved false: how should lesser goods prove more
genuine The only coherent thought in the inchoate
quagmire of agony in which he writhed was a dim
obsession that he mu^ not truft to anyone or anything.
From Newton and Mrs. Newton, at times even from
L 14s

The Stricken Deer 146

Mary herself, he shrank in wild-eyed horror. He
refused to touch any food they brought him, for fear it
was poisoned. Had he not loved them next his faith ?
Then they muft be next his faith in falseness. Dr.
Cotton was called in to help him ; but Dr. Cotton was
associated in Cowper’s mind with the happiness of his
conversion, and he turned away from him with dull
suspicion. Suicide itself, which had seemed to him
the unforgivable sin, now began to present itself to
him in the ilrange guise of a Christian obligation. It
ftruck him that Abraham had reconciled himself to
God by the sacrifice of what he held moSt dear—his
son: might not he reconcile himself to God by the
sacrifice of what he held moSt dear—his own life ?
Once again he tried to hang himself. Once again he
failed. But this time he had no reaftion again^l it.
He only felt that he had loft the laft despairing chance
of redeeming himself, and he sank into a dumb
lethargy of despair. He came down to meals and
went for walks and worked in the garden, with bent
brows and tense, fixed ftare, oblivious of all around
him. Only when he was asleep did he forget his
troubles. Mrs. Unwin, tiptoeing into his room
with shaded candle to see how he was refting,
would wonder to see the lined brow smooth, the worn
face relaxed in a childlike smile, while at intervals he
murmured in a drowsy happiness fragments of those
hymns and prayers in which of old he had been wont
to express his unsullied truft in God, When morning
came he would be as bad as ever. He only knew the
normal world in dreams: awake he lived in a nightmare.

It seemed impossible that he should ever rise a
second time from such an abyss. But he did. For
all his hyper-sensitiveness Cowper was not without
vitality. Indeed, his very sensitiveness, his quick¬
silver responsiveness to circumftances and suggeftion,
could only have belonged to a nature in whom the

147 9 f Cowper

pulse of life beat high* You muft be very much alive
to feel as much as that. His spirit, so fragile, so
dejeftcd, so palpitatingly naked to pain, yet bore
within it a slmall, welling fountain of vitality that, unless
completely destroyed, could never long be kept from
flowing. Cramped by physical disability, clogged by
nervous inhibition, shut in by external circumftances,
it yet within a short time began to gush forth and
force a passage for itself to the daylight. Nothing
happened to alter his conviftion that he was damned;
but slowly, gradually, impelled by nothing but the
sheer impulse to live behind them, his torn nerves
began to mend, his spirits to resume their equilibrium.
All the same they could not have done it alone. Cow¬
per could never have endured through his period of
chaotic despair long enough to let the mysterious forces
of life within him begin to work unless he had had
something or someone to support him. In a word,
he would never have recovered if it had not been for
Mrs. Unwin.

From the moment he became ill she gave herself up
bodv and soul to his service as calmly and unobtru¬
sively and decisively as she did everything else. It
was not a light task. At firSt, Cowper as often as not
was a moaning, gibbering maniac; later sunk in a
Stupor. Sometimes he shrank away from her in
suspicious horror, more often sat for whole days
together without showing a sign of pleasure at her
presence. Yet he could not bear her to be away from
nim for a moment. Every minute of every day she
watched v/ith unrelaxed attention for the firSl signs
of one of his fits of mania, that she might soothe it
before it grew uncontrollable. Often she never left
him even at night: when she did she never knew if
she might not be woken up to Slop him killing himself.
The days lengthened to summer, contrafted to winter,
lengthened to summer again. And Slill the crisis

The Stricken Deer

148

was not passed, and ^ill her task went on. It was a
terrible ftrain. Her health was impaired for ever.

She had other annoyances to put up with. The
parishioners of Olney thought her connexion with
Cowper an odd one, and they said so. But Mrs. Unwin
was unconventional, as only the simple-minded can be.
She had always been accuftomed to do what she thought
right regardless of difficulty. And she never thought
about what other people would think of her, because
she never thought about herself at all. Nor was she
encouraged to do so by her religion. Her Evangelical¬
ism was not the religion of respeftability. It had the
virtues as well as the defefts of its exclusiveness. If it
taught her to shun the pleasures of the world as
wicked, it also taught her to scorn its censures as
trivial. It shone out, the sole and heavenly light by
which she should guide herself in a dark world. It
was the fanaticism of her faith that enabled Mrs. Unwin
to go through what she did. Nor did its narrowness
matter. Depth, not breadth, was what she needed.
Againft the surrounding blackness her plain, deter¬
mined figure assumes the heroic proportions of an
Antigone,

She saved Cowper: the mere consciousness of a
tangible human relationship gave him a solid foothold
on exigence when all the reSt of the ground seemed
collapsing beneath him. The feeling that someone
loved him, and someone sane and good, made him
want to cling to life when he was far too di^lrafted to
be affefted by a more ab^traft motive. He held on to
Mrs. Unwinds hand like a child in the dark, and after
two years a few faint streaks of light began to appear.
He grew calmer, began to take an interest in things
around him; in May 1774 he was well enough to go
back to Orchard Side.

Newton could not pretend he was sorry to see him
go« Not that his Evangelicalism had been any less

149 Cowper

praftical than Mrs. Unwin’s. He had put up Cowper
in his house for a year. He had put up Mrs. Unwin
too, in face of the outraged public opinion of his parish.
And he had refused to let either of them pay a penny
for their keep, because he thought a Chriilian minifter
ought not to take money for doing good. But he had
found it a strain. It was no joke to have a lunatic
living in one’s small house for a year, especially such
a gloomy lunatic. “ Yefterday, as he was feeding
the chickens,” he writes with a certain pathos, ” some
incident made him smile. I am pretty sure it is the
first smile that has been seen on his race for sixteen
months.” Such a gueft certainly detrafted from
those amenities that the mo£t Evangelical of clergymen
had a right to expeft of family life. And there seemed
no reason why Cowper should ever go. By 1774 he
was physically quite well, and there was his own house
waiting for him, ju^l across the garden. But when
Mary suggested they should return there, he only
burSt into tears. The robuft-minded Newton found
it indeed hard to sympathize with such an attitude,
especially as Cowper was putting him to considerable
expense. Try as he might, as week succeeded week
and month succeeded month he could not help remem¬
bering this. ” Upon the whole, I have not been weary
of my cross,” he reflefled when at laft they had gone,
“ yet sometimes my heart has been importunate and
rebellious.”

For the second time Cowper had begun to emerge
from the black cloud of madness. But this second
recovery was of a very different kind from the fir^l.
That had broken over him in a great wave of joy that
had washed all the horrors of madness clean out of
his mind, and quickened him to an intensity of spirit
he had never .known'before. But his second madness
had inflifted a deeper wound on his nervous system—
far too deep, in faft, to disappear in a moment. And

The Stricken Deer 150

now he felt no sudden change in his spirits. He Still
believed he was damned. So little hold had he on
reality that for years after this he could never be sure
if the Newton he saw was really Newton or some
phantom masquerading in his shape. Only his
vitality was so ftrong that in spite of injuries it had
begun in time to force him towards recovery. Even
if he was to be damned in the next world he found some
enjoyment in things in this ; and he began to feel he had
better take his pleasure as he could and while he could.
Resolutely averting his eyes from the painful subjeft
of his soul, therefore, he began to concentrate on the
interests and happenings of every day.

he could only do this sporadically. His whole
being had been so shattered by his illness that he was
incapable of apprehending happiness except in snatches,
and those far too seldom for him to firing together
on them any scheme of exigence. Mo^l of the time
he lay like a man rescued from drowning, in a sort of
twilit coma, neither sad nor happy, only relieved
to be free from the draggling agony of the moment
before. A chance phrase or thought would as often
as not recall his spiritual condition to him; the world
would grow dark around him, and he would bury his
face in his hands. But now and again the sight of some
natural beauty would breathe a whiff of happiness into
his heart; his eyes would brighten, and he would look
around. Or his wailed lips would part in involuntary
laughter at some prank of cat or clog playing in the
garden. All his moments of enjoyment came from
Nature or animals. The keenest pleasures of his child¬
hood had been connefted with them; and now, at
this his third re-birth into the world of sense, it was
the pleasures of childhood that fivSt ^lirred a response
within him.

One day, a little time after they had come back to
Orchard Side, a neighbour arrivcd^ith a tame hare

151 Lije oj Cowper

he thought Cowper might like to^ceep as a pet. He
was delighted with it. For hours every day he would
watch its antics and try to tame it. The good people
of Olney, delighted that something had at lail given
pleasure to the poor gentleman at Orchard Side, all began
to give him hares. This was too much of a good thing.
Cowper thanked them all with his usual politeness,
but only kept three of their presents. For the next
few years these hares—Bess, Puss and Tiny—were a
dominating interest in his life. His sympathy had
always enabled him to enter into the lives of those he
saw around him. And with the hares he had entered
into a life from which all the painful problems of
human existence were necessarily absent. In their
company he escaped for a moment from hell—not into
heaven, but into Eden before the Fall; into a life
physical and sylvan, innocent of the knowledge of good
and evil; a remote Hans Andersen garden world,
where a blade of grass was as big as a bush and the
greatest enemy was a hornet and the garden wall was
the end of the cosmos. The hares—bold Bess, timid
affeftionate Puss, who pulled at his coat with his
teeth to make him go out, and surly Tiny, who gam¬
bolled with an expression of dignified disguft on his
whiskered features—grew as individual and entertain¬
ing to him as his friends ; only they were without that
difturbing human attribute, the soul, the very name
of which made him feel depressed. He never tired of
observing their habits, noticing how BeSs liked to
spend the morning asleep an)ong the cucumbers, and
Tiny always frisked moft wildly when the sky grew
dark before a ^lorm. He had work to do for them too :
to got their food, bread and lettuce in the summer, and
bread and shredded carrot in the winter; to shake out
their ^Iraw beds ; to shut them up for the night. He
made them each a little wooden hutch, and devised a
little entrance into the drawing-room through which

The Stricken Deer 152

they could run in and out from these hutches in the
evenings.

All this was a great Step forward. For the firSt time
since his illness he had found happiness, not in
capricious moments of emotion, but in a regular
intereft outside himself. The daily tasks imposed
something of order on his life without regard for his
moods; while the light manual labour of carpentering
and cleaning diverted his attention, without tiring his
brain. From now on he took a fteady turn for the
better. The hares had so intensified his love of
animals that he began to keep more pets. Goldfish,
guinea-pigs, birds, a cat and a dog—Mungo—succes¬
sively made their way into the house, till poor Mary
muft have felt she was living in a menagerie rather
than a human dwelling. Then Cowper took to
gardening again. There was not much garden at
Orchard Side. But he sowed and weeded and watered
every inch of what there was; was always out if the
weather allowed, sweeping the paths or planting the
neat rows of mignonette and lavender, whose scent
was to blow so deliciously in at the window when the
summer did come. At firSt all his garden was out¬
doors. Then someone gave him some pineapple
seeds; he got a frame for them and finally a little
greenhouse. Besides the pineapples, he grew gera¬
niums in it and orange blossom, and even a New
Zealand flower called the Broallia, which both he and
Mary thought “ the mo^l elegant flower they had ever
seen,’* Lord Dartmouth, who came over one day to
see it with Newton, thought so too; so that they felt
they mu^ be right.

Cowper threw himself into gardening and keeping
hares with the same passion with which he had thrown
himself into Latin-verse writing when he was fifteen,
and religious exercises when he was thirty-two. But
they could not occupy his whole attention, and as he

153 °f Cowper

got better he began to look about for occupation that
would take up more of his time. Carpentering was his
firil choice. He used to do odd jobs about the house,
mending cracked windows and rickety table legs,
and he made a ^lool and a chair as a present for Mary.
He enjoyed the work very much, but it hurt his eyes,
so he had to give it up. Drawing attracted him next:
by its help he felt he would be able on the rawest winter
day to dwell for a little amid those summer scenes
that had such power to soothe his soul. He had a
master at hand in a Mr. Andrews, who lived near by.
Olney was no centre of the visual arts, and moft of
this poor gentleman’s time was spent in carving
scythes and draped urns for tombilones. But he also
taught people to draw. Cowper gave himself up to
his new pursuit with his wonted enthusiasm, sat all
day before his easel drawing dabchicks and mountains,
and by the end of a few months had become sufficiently
proficient to present Mr. and Mrs. Newton with
two sketches for their parlour wall. But, as he might
have expefted, the work began to hurt his eyes, as
much as carpentering had done. And he was forced to
give it up too.

And now what was he to do } Idleness left him
vitally open to nervous attack, yet there seemed
nothing he could do that would occupy his time.
Suddenly he thought of literature. Even since he was
a child he had amused himself by writing occasional
verses. Why should he not attempt something more
ambitious ? The idea took hold of him as no other
had done. Not only would composition occupy his
mind, but he might by means of it teach valuable
moral lessons. For even in his present condition of
mind, when the whole subjeft of religion looked black
in his eyes, his conscience was worried by the thought
that he was not in some way trying to further the cause
of God. Once more he took up a new task with

The Stricken Deer 154

tremendous energy, and within a few months he had
finished two long poems. He worked so hard, in
fa£t, that Mary thought he was making himself ill,
and begged him to ftop. He submitted; but the
lack of occupation brought on such an alarming fit
of depression that she very soon besought him to take
up his pen again. He was never to lay it aside till
his laft illness. Thus, as a chance diversion of con¬
valescence, did Cowper begin that work which alone
has kept his name clear from those mifts of oblivion
which enshroud moSt of his contemporaries. At the
age of forty-nine, unintentionally, he entered on the
career of a famous poet.

The effeft of his new work on his life was immediate.
At laft he had found an occupation which rea^y filled
his time. Gardening, carpentering, drawing^ had at
beil only been able to occupy him while he was actually
working at them, and as he got more accuftomed to
doing so, they had not been able to hold him even then.
While his careful fingers worked, his mind wandered,
wandered irresistibly as Fatima to the forbidden door
of his spiritual condition. But he could not write
without thinking about it all the time he did it. And
he would go on thinking about it when he was not
writing at all. His life was therefore no longer a
darkness lit up by spasmodic and capricious flashes.
It had Structure and purpose, and though there were
dark moments in it, they did not break up this Structure
and purpose. Besides, writing gave him a means of
self-expression, an outlet for his rising energy, a
satisfaftion for his starved vitality, which accelerated
his nervous recovery sevenfold. Soon he felt ^rong
enough to turn his attention to the world of human
beings. He began to write regularly to Hill and
Unwin again, to take an intere^ in the life of Olney.
By 1780 he had managed to weld the shattered,
scattered fragments of his life and thought into some

155 Cowper

sort of permanent pattern. The mi^ls of madness
have parted on a new phase of Cowper’s existence.

It was not at all like the one on which they closed.
The unearthly light and unearthlier darkness have
vanished, and we are back into the plain daylight
of the eighteenth century, the busy, sequestered
domestic world of BerkhamSted and Southampton
Row. On Cowper himself neither his Evangelicalism
nor his madness had left much outward trace. Long
absence from society had, indeed, given his manners a
shy, old-fashioned ceremoniousness; but this only
added an individual and delightful flavour to the irony
and sweetness which they enshrined. And to women
especially, his anxious courtesy was charming. He
was grown a little fat and a little bald: was he not
nearly fifty! But there had always been a sober
fcmpishness about him which had made him take care
or his appearance. Even at his mo^l religious, he
would always write to William Unwin to get him a
“ smartish ** ^lock-buckle or a new-fashioned cocked
hat. And now, dressed for the afternoon in blue coat
and green satin wai^lcoat, with his scanty hair rein¬
forced by some from the barber and done in a bag
with a black ribbon, and carrying a snuffbox in his
hand, he looked, as he said, “ a very smart youth for
his years.”

Nor did the outward ordering of his life offend
^ain^l the conventional standards of his neighbours.
Tne holy singularity of which he had been so proud
at Huntingdon was gone. Instead of vigils and
meditations ana prayer meetings, his time was taken
up by the thousand trivial necessary avocations of
house and garden that occupied the people around him.
His life was ilill very regular, its unvarying round
modified only by the seasons. In winter, when the
greater part of his work was done, it was spent moilly
in one room—the little wainscoted parlour of Orchard

The Stricken Deer 156

Side, thirteen foot square, with its spindle-legged
chairs and its view of the Street and its print of Cowper’s
old friend Thurlow over the chimney-piece. It was
here, at the civilized hour of ten, in his dressing-gown
and cap, that he had his breakfast, and Mary poured
out his morning cup of Gleaming, scented bohea for
him. He used to sit on for a little after breakfaft,
reading while she sewed. If something ftruck him
in his book he would read it aloud to her; then they
relapsed into a placid silence. Next he muSi see
after the greenhouse and the hares and the birds and
the cat. And now he muSt sit down to the two or
three hours’ writing which made up his very reasonable
working day. His writing-table was an old card-
table ; but of course it had never been used as such
since it had come into the possession of this godly
household. It was not very good for writing on, as
it was so low. Cowper had painfully to heave an
atlas on to it every time he wanted to work. He and
Mary ate off it too ; but it was no better for that than
for writing. It had little shallow hollows round the
edge, originally meant for counters, and Cowper and
Mary always forgot about these when they were
covered up by the tablecloth, and put their glasses
down on them. So that they were always spilt, and
often broken. Still, it was the only table in the house
that was the right size, and they made the be^ of it.
A walk followed, then dinner; and then possibly
another walk, sharp, through the frozen or muddy
lanes, with the sear leaves ruilling round Cowper’s
feet, and Mungo leaping before him. Nobody in
those days was so silly as to go out if the weather was
really bad. Indeed their clothes did not permit it.
And during the bad weather of 1781 Cowper and
Mary hardly ilirred from their tiny house and tinier
garden from November to February. But Cowper
was far too regular in his habits to forego his daily

157 Cowper

exercise, and on bad days he used to swing dumb-bells
or skip or play a decorous game of battledore and
shuttlecock with Mary. As the short winter’s day
faded to a close, once more he heaved the atlas on to
the table, and sat down to read or write. Sometimes
as he sat there in the gathering dusk, where the fire¬
light set the room ailir with shadows, the paper would
drop from his hand and he would sink into a drowsy
reverie. Idly he fancied ca^lles and forests in the
crumbling coals, discerned portents in the fantastic
filaments of soot that formed and fell on the bars of
the grate. And then his attention would wander,
and he would sit gazing with fixed, absent eyes, loft
for a short moment perhaps in some country of his
desire—green blossoming woods of spring, or by the
glittering sea. Suddenly a noise would penetrate
his consciousness—the wind rattling the window, or
the maid coming in with the tea. Blinking his eyes
in the unaccuftomed brightness of the candlelight,
he would shift his position and return to earth. And
now began that moment of the day that Cowper liked
beft—tea-time on a winter’s evening. He liked tea
better than any other drink—it gave him juft the
mild ftimulus that his nerves required. And the
little meal in the cosy, candlelit room, alone with his
beft friend, and the winter’s night shut out by curtains,
was the very incarnation of that innocent security
which all his life had been his idea of perfeft happiness.
The rain might drum on the window, the wind whiftlc
along the deserted ftreet; it only emphasized the
warmth and comfort inside, where the kettle hummed,
and the cat lapped up its milk, and Cowper and Mary
laughed over the day’s happenings. They were
interrupted by the twang of a horn and the hollow
sound of the galloping of hoofs outside. It was the

{ )oft arriving at the “ Bull Inn.” And a few minutes
ater a rqsh of cold air would blow into the house as

The Stricken Deer 158

the door opened to admit letters and newspaper—that
newspaper that brought to Olney the news of Mr.
Fox’s lail speech, and the Duke of Devonshire’s la^t
rout, and Mr. Wilke’s laif enormity. After tea, the
little door in the wall was unlatched, and for a short
time the room was alive with the scampering of the
hares. Then Cowper and Mary settled down to a
quiet evening. She always worked, either knitting
his socks or embroidering.

“ The well-depifled flower,”

as Cowper put it,

“ Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn
Unfolds its bosom. . .

Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes copied out what
he had written in the morning, sometimes, if he was
tired, ju^f wound her wool for her. But whatever
they were either of them doing, it generally ended in
conversation—long, delicious conversation, now gay,
now serious; and now their voices would soften in
tender reminiscence, now hush into a silence more
intimate than speech. A country supper of eggs and
radishes, enlivened by a modest glass of wine, rounded
off their evening. And then, candle in hand, they
said good-night. Summer days passed in much the
same occupations as winter. But they were spent
for the mo^ part outdoors, reading or working in the
garden; ana Mary and Cowper often took a walk
before supper.

They were not confined exclusively to each other’s
society. The “ County,” indeed, they did not see
much of. To do so entailed keeping a carriage; and,
anyway, Cowper had very little in common with the
card-playing, ball-going County ladies, and ^ill less
with the red-faced, two-bottle, fox-hunting Squire
Weberns who were their husbands and brothers. His

159 Cowper

pets had given him a hatred of all forms of sport. He
attacked cruelty to animals unceasingly both in prose
and verse—not always his beft verse—

“ I would not number in my of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

An inadvertent ftep may crush the snail
That crawls at evening on the public path,

But he that has humanity, forewarned,

Will tread aside and let the reptile live.”

But to find friends Cowper did not need to fly high
or far, Newton, indeed, was with him no longer. He
had not been so successful at Olney as he had intended.
After the fir^l shock of surprise had worn off, the
people had ceased to pay much heed to his vehement
ministrations, and in spite, possibly because of, the
fa£t that he redoubled his efforts, they came in time
aftively to dislike him. His unpopularity reached its
climax when he announced from his pulpit one autumn
Sunday that he hoped no one would illuminate their
houses or make a bonfire on the approaching 5th of
November. Not only did many people Slick candles
in their windows who had never thought of doing such
a thing before, but a large crowd of infuriated revellers
marched down to attack the Vicarage. Newton was
for defying these Sons of Belial like the prophets of old ;
but the prayers of his panic-Slricken wire persuaded
him to take the more pacific course of paying them to
go away. His pride was doubly wounded. And when
in 1779 he was offered the Parish of St. Mary Wool-
noth in London he accepted it. His resilient spirits
soon recovered themselves at the prospect of the
greater scope for his talents and enterprise afforded by
a London parish. “ I am about to form a connection
for life with one Mary Woolnoth, a reputed London
Saint in Lombard Street,’* he remarked Humorously.

The Stricken Deer i6o

His departure did not mean as much to Cowper as it
would have done ten years before. Since his illness
each of them felt the other’s company a slight ^rain.
Cowper could not bear to mention the subjeft of
religion ; and he knew Newton cared to talk of nothing
else. So that, though he was Still very fond of him,
he felt awkward in his presence; and even when he
wrote to him, as he did regularly after he had left,
it was in an embarrassed, self-depreciatory tone, as if
apologizing for his inability to provide what Newton
had a right to demand. Newton, for his part, had
not loSi his affeftion for Cowper. But his dominating
nature resented the feeling that anyone had escaped,
however unwillingly, from the orbit of his influence;
and temperamentally he had no sympathy with
defeatism. He could not help thinking Cowper
would be all right if he would only make an eflFort.
And he told him so. This in its turn irritated Cowper,
who felt Newton was not making the slighted attempt
to understand him. All the same, when the moment
of departure actually arrived, all Cowper’s other
feelings were overwhelmed in a gush of regretful
emotion. His timid, constant nature, fearful of the
future, tenacious of the paSt, felt any change a painful
wrench. And, besides, Newton and Mrs. Newton and
the whole Newton household were bound up in his
mind with that period of his life which, however
tragic its termination, was yet its only period of joy
and of hope. The Vicarage looks a melancholy
objeft,” he wrote to Mrs. Newton. “ As I walked in
the garden I saw the smoke issuing from the Study
chimney, and said to myself, * That used to be a sign
that Mr. Newton was there, but it is so no longer.’
The walls of the house know nothing of the change
that has taken place. The bolt of the chamber door
sounds juSl as it used to do; and when Mr. Page goes
upstairs, for aught I know the fall of his foot could

i6i Life of Cowper

hardly be distinguished from that of Mr. Newton.
But Mr. Newton's foot will never be heard upon that
Staircase again. . . . Though in many respe£ts I have
no more sensibility left in me than there is in brick
and mortar, yet I am not permitted to be quite unfeeling
on this subjeft."

Even when Newton was gone, however, Cowper was
not deprived of clerical society. Fashionable or fox¬
hunting parsons were even more dreadful in his eyes
than fashionable or fox-hunting squires; but Newton
had managed to make Olney a little centre of “ faith¬
ful " ministers. Mr, Scott, the curate of WeSton,
was an example of the extraordinary force of his
personality. Till middle life he had lived the respedt-
able, unimpassioned life of the orthodox Church of
England clergyman. Then, going into a cottage one
day by chance, he found Newton praying by a dying
man. The faith that glowed in his eyes, the ardour
that rang through every modulation of his voice, so
affedted Scott that from that very day he became a
Strong Evangelical. Cowper saw a certain amount of
him. He was a scholar, and used to drop in to ask
advice on a point of Style in some commentary he was
writing. And once a fortnight at leaSt the little
parlour at Orchard Side was filled with the huge form
and exuberant personality of Mr. Bull, the Noncon¬
formist minister from Newport Pagnell.

The Reverend William Bull was one of those Strong,
independent, eccentric charadters that England, and
rural England especially, seems to produce at all
times as frequently and effortlessly as those writhen
and Sturdy oak trees which they so closely resemble.
He was the son of a yeoman; and a Strong religious
experience when he was a child had decided him to
enter the Independent ministry. He had taught
himself Hebrew, been ordained, and had spent the
reSt of his life at Newport Pagnell, where he divided

M

The Stricken Deer

162

his time between ministering to his flock and working
in his Study. This lonely and self-dependent course
of life, in which all his natural idiosyncrasies had
been allowed to develop unmodified by conventional
influence, had Streaked every aspedt or his character
and habits with a kind of quaintness. He had a rich,
fiery, winning personality, and imagination and humour
and learning as well. But his imagination ran riot
in fantaS'an /lights; his humour was extravagant and
uncoutt.iy' and his learning was a lumber room of
curious information and ideas—valuable and worthless
indiscriminately heaped together—more like that of
some seventeenth-century savant, Browne or Burton,
than the regulated classicism of eighteenth-century
scholarship. His amusements were eccentric, too.
He had a niche cut in his garden wall, where he would
sit and contemplate, almost completely surrounded
with brickwork within three or four inches of his
nose. And he measure^, the circumference of his
small plot of garden, and men took exercise by walking
doggedly round it every- day, marking each round by
moving a bit of shot along a groove in the wall till
he had walked five miles. His life revolved round
religion; but his religion, like his learning, seemed
to belong less to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth
century: it wa^ myftical and disordered, given to
expressing itself in wild vagaries of the imagination,
even in jokes. He was an eloquent preacher in a
^lyle of his own, full of homely metaphors and allusions,
and so much in earned that the very mention of the
Passion was enough to fill his eyes with fears. But
in the midil of the mo5f emotional passage, perhaps
on the Passion, he wou/d ^lop to bawl objurgations at
someone trying to slip away from church before the
sermon was over. He was naive, too. Once he was
persuaded to visit Scotland. He enjoyed himself,
but was very much concerned not to be ensnared by

163 Ltje of Cowper

the worldly splendours he saw there. Cardinal
Beaton’s palace he said was fine, but not as fine as
heaven; he was at pains that people should realize
he could not think or comparing it to heaven. But in
spite of his peculiarities he was by far the moSt inter¬
esting person living near Olney. After all, it was
something to find someone with humour and imagina¬
tion and learning, however eccentric his habits.
Cowper met him with Newton, and took to him
immediately. He had that infeftious vitality that
always attracted him; and soon it was a recognized
thing that Bull should dine at Orchard Side once
a fortnight. His idiosyncrasies appeared even in
his personal relationships. Sometimes he would be
robuSlly mirthful, at others subdued, melancholy and
confiding ; but Cowper liked him all the better for this.
To be made a partner of another’s mood gave him juSl
that assurance of intimacy without which friendship
was no pleasure to him. He was more put off by
Bull’s smoking, a habit which, as a symbol of exclu¬
sively male society, he had always dete^ed; but he
grew even to like it, so much did it seem part of those
happy evenings when dear ‘‘ Taureau,” as he affedlion-
ately called Bull, sat puffing away beside him in the
garden of Orchard Side, or, more rarely, in the dusky,
casemented library of his own house at Newport
Pagnell.

But the great of Olney—clergymen and school-
makers—were not the only people in whom Cowper
took an interek. From the sash-window of the
parlour, year after year, he used to watch the sleepy,
desultory life of the country kreet, and note with
unfailing, amused interek its dikinftive figures:
Palmer the draper, kanding in the doorway of his shop,
Wilson the barber, krolling along, a wig box on his
arm, such a krik Sabbatarian that he refused to dress
even the hair of a lady of title on Sunday; so that she

The Stricken Deer 164

had, poor thing 1 to have it done the evening before,
and sit up all night for fear of disarranging it: Nathan
Sample, the maltfter, who, though less regularly
religious, was always ready to declaim againft the
Papists. Every morning, juft as Cowper was cleaning
his teeth, he would see old Geary Ball shambling paft
the window—Geary Ball, once a burning and shining
light of the Gospel, but now only regular in his attend¬
ance at the bar of the “ Fox and Grapes/' And after
him, perhaps, might ftrut a pursy figure, with thumb
on hip and blase expression on his face—a lacemaker
whose name Cowper never knew, but whom he called
the “ Olney misanthrope," because in all the years he
had seen him he had never observed him speaking to
anyone.

Nor did he merely look on at Olney life. He took
part in it as well. It had got about that he had been a
lawyer, and the front door of Orchard Side often opened
and shut to admit some shopkeeper anxious to learn
some point of law, but less anxious to pay a professional
lawyer to tell him. “ They cannot be persuaded,"
said Cowper ruefully, " that a head once covered by a
legal periwig can be deficient in those natural endow¬
ments that it is supposed to cover." Then he took
part in charitable work. It was he who, when the
Olney lace-makers were ftarving, wrote to Mr. Smith,
the rich Nottingham banker, for help ; and when Mr.
Smith very generously sent fifty pounds, it was Cowper
who diftributed it. Again, he was one of the prime
movers in eftablishing the Sunday School in 1785.
Indeed, it was high time; for in spite of poor Newton's
efforts, the children of Olney, even those of seven
years old, were profane. Cowper and Mary had often
haftily to turn aside when they met a party of them,
left their sensitive ears might be oflonded by the
frightful language they might hear.

Indeed, life at Olney was not without its incidents.

165 Lije oj Cowper

Out of the window one day Cowper saw a scene of
Hogarthian farce. The beadle was flogging a man
for dealing, the magistrate beating the beadle for not
hitting hard enough, and an angry virago beating the
magistrate for beating the beadle. On another night
one of the hares ran away : a terrible excitement! Half
the town was out after it. It ran two miles, and a man
caught it in a back yard, and Cowper rewarded him
with the large sum of six shillings. In 1784 came
the Election, and the candidate—'* a moft loving,
kissing, kind-hearted gentleman ''—came to solicit
Cowper’s intereSf, and surprised them all in the middle
of tea, and kissed Mrs. Unwin and the cook. The
monotony of the daily round was also varied now and
again by visitors. William Unwin came, which was
pleasant, and Mrs. Powley, which was less so. Cowper
noticed that she never laughed at any of his jokes;
he concluded she had no sense of humour. Aftually
she believed him to have robbed her mother of 800 ;
so perhaps she was throughout the visit in a ilate
of scarcely suppressed indignation. Newton came
to ^lay once or twice too. His company, we know,
Cowper felt to be rather a strain. But he enjoyed
having Mrs. Newton, and ^fill more Miss Catlett,
Newton’s niece, whom he had adopted, a cheerful
child of thirteen or fourteen. “ Euphrosyne, the
laughing lady,” Cowper called her, and ” Oh, Miss
Catlett,” he would say, looking across the table with a
gentle twinkle in his eye, ” oh, Miss Catlett, will you
have a cutlet ? ” Other visitors came to Olney besides
those who came to Orchard Side. Once, in 1738,
a menagerie arrived, with a real live lion. The keeper
would have put his head in its mouth, only Cowper
besought him not to unless he had another to spare.
And in the April of 1784 Lord Houghton’s regiment
was billeted in Olney, and the band gave a concert
one morning juft outside Orchard Side. Bright

The Stricken Deer

i66

glinted the sun on red coats and pipeclayed breeches,
shrill and sweet came the sound of bugle and fife on
the chill spring air. Regardless of the cold, Cowper
hung out of the window, driving to catch every note.
He wondered if he was wrong to enjoy it so much.
In the days of his conversion he would certainly have
thought so; but his life was so starved of aesthetic
experience, that the little regimental band filled him
with a rapture not to be resided.

Starved, did I say ? I was wrong. For though
the achievements of conscious art did not come his way,
their place in his emotional life was more than supplied
by the works of Nature. He had always loved natural
beauty, but never with such an exclusive intensity as
now. It was to it he had turned firft of all when he
began to recover, and as his energy increased he only
turned to it the more. Cut off as he was from the
satisfadions of mysticism on the one hand and those
of adlive life on the other, all the capacity for joy
inherent in his highly-^rung nature had to pour itself
down this one narrow channel. The faft that it was
narrow only made it flow the stronger. “ Oh, I could
spend whole days and moonlight nights,” he exclaimed,
“ in feeding upon a lovely prospeft! Mine eyes
drink the rivers as they flow.” His was not the
visionary Wordsworthian feeling that loves the visible
world as the incarnation of a Divine eternal Spirit.
Even the religious tinge with which it had been in-
vefted in the days of his conversion had now vanished,
though he ifill prefaced any expression of his feeling
by an acknowledgment to God. But in reality a great
deal of Cowper’s pleasure arose from the fadt that
natural beauty belonged, like his hares, to that part of
life into which the dismal problems of the soul did not
enter, that it had no need of a remoter charm un¬
gathered from the eye and asked for its appreciation
only the immediate inilindfive pleasure that it ^imu-

167 Lije of Cowper

lated. Indeed his enjoyment gained an exquisite,
intolerable poignancy from his conviftion that it had
no significance in that world of spiritual values which,
in his view, was the only reality, that all this tangible,
palpable, ravishing beauty he saw around him was
really but the shadow of a shade, which within a few
brief years would be \oSt to him for ever.

And if he did not love Nature in the way Words¬
worth did, neither did he, like Keats, love it because
it fed his imagination, because he could use those
aspefts of it he thought the lovelieft to create the land
of his dream. He loved it with an objeftive, self-
effacing love, for what it was; and every aspeft of it
was beautiful to him. There was no sound in Nature
that was not harmonious outdoors, he said, after
sitting out one sunny morning in the garden. Bees,
dogs, even geese, he loved them all—except perhaps a
donkey; and even the donkey he disliked because it
had been braying close to him juft when he was trying
to work. And what he felt of natural sounds he felt
of sights and smells as well. Actually the country of his
preference, humdrum, overgrown Buckinghamshire,
was not very pretty. But it was the country he knew
beft, and therefore he liked it beft. With all its,
intensity, Cowper’s love of Nature was of a piece with
the reft of his feelings, an affeftion rather than a passion.
He loved it as he loved Mrs. Unwin, quietly, patiently,
tenaciously, without moods or explosions, with a
ftrength that grew with the passage of years, cemented
by habit, hallowed by a thousand tender recolleftions.
And he knew the objeft of his love as one can only
know an old friend. It presented no detail so tiny
that he did not remark it, no fleeting alteration that
escaped him. With the delicate accuracy of a micro¬
scope, he would note how already, in September, the
sycamore showed red againft the varying green of the
surrounding trees; how the cock waded with altered.

The Stricken Deer

i68

hampered gait through the winter snow; the curious,
sweet, amber smell the earth gave forth in hot weather;
the squirrel’s winter ne^l of wool and leaves hidden
in the recesses of the hollow elm. Cowper had walked
so long and so often in the woods that the animals did
not mind him. The rabbits did not cease to gambol
as he passed, and the ring-doves cooed at his approach.

His preoccupation with detail was increased by the
faft that the range of his observation was so limited.
It was confined, indeed, to the garden and his daily
walks ; and the walks he could go were few. There
was a sequeftered field he liked, especially on the hot
summer days, where he lingered likening to the black¬
birds beneath the flickering shade of a group of
poplars which reflefted themselves in the waters of the
Ouse, winding between them. One melancholy day
he arrived to find the grass and a few Slumps naked
to the sunshine. The trees had been cut down.

‘‘ The poplars are felled,” sang Cowper, “ and farewell to the shade

And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.”

After this his walks were almoft entirely limited to the
Wilderness of Weilon Park—a country house about
a mile from Olney. It belonged to a Mr. Throck¬
morton, who gave Cowper the keys. It was one of
those civilized wildernesses that Capability Brown
devised to satisfy the longings of a society weary at
times of play and masquerade, but shrinking from
the grossness of rustic reality: elegant Arcadias in a
^yle of conscious irregularity, a discreet English
version of the baroque pastorals of Trianon and
Bayreuth; deliberately winding walks that opened as
by chapce on lovely calculated villas; smooth-swept
swards where an eighteenth-century lady might com¬
mune with Nature and not soil her silken skirts;
artfully disposed groves “ sacred to retirement,” where

169 Life oj Cowper

the Gibbonian philosopher might meditate in comfort
on the pleasures of rural solitude. Wefton Wilder¬
ness is a small example of the ^lyle ; but it is none the
less charming for that. The artificial always looks
heSt in miniature. It is a feathery plantation only
about half a mile square, but it is divided up into a
network of narrow walks thickly planted on each side,
to make it seem three times its real size. And there
is a Gothic temple in it, and an avenue; and now and
again one comes on a little sculptured urn with an
inscription on it to the memory of one of the Throck-
mortons’ dogs. It is a forlorn place now. The
paths are piled with leaves; the grass waves knee-
high ; the carving on the urns is blurred with moss.
But it ilill retains a charming flavour of the pail.
Amid a prosaic agricultural landscape, it Elands like a
fragment of the eighteenth century ilrayed by some
Grange accident of time and space into an age not its
own; and as one passes between the classical piers
that form its entrance into the green twilight of its
walks one seems to be Pepping back into 1780, and
half expefts to meet Cowper’s lanky figure, flecked
by shifting gleams of sunshine, pacing the turf towards
one. Perhaps his ghoft does walk there—with a
speftral Mungo barking soundlessly at his heels.
Certainly the whole place is inftinft with his spirit.

He had always liked Nature heSt slightly tamed,
and there was no moment of the year when the
Wilderness was not beautiful to him. It was lovely
on a sunny, breezy May morning, when the trees were
in early leaf, grey willow and silvery poplar and glossy
maple, with guelder rose and laburnum and bending
lilac flowering beneath them, and violet and mezereon
at their root; and the birds sang and the squirrels
chattered and scampered

“In anger insignificantly fierce; ”

The Stricken Deer ijo

or at the late end of a summer’s day, when all was
indi^linft in the warm dusk, and the scents of evening
were fresh in the air. Exquisite summer evenings,
when Cowper and Mary loitered home to supper
contentedly weary, their arms full of honeysuckle, and
the young moon going up the sky before them. But
the Wilderness was lovely in winter too: on calm,
cryilal mornings after snow, when Cowper’s figure
slanted, blue and grotesquely long, across the glaring
whiteness, and Mungo leapt and rolled and buried his
nose in the powdery cold, and beneath the thick
branches of the central avenue the moss was ilill green,
and it was so quiet that you could hear the bells of
Clifton Church, now loud, now soft, away the other
side of the valley; or on winter afternoons, when
already at a quarter to four Cowper would gaze between
the leafless boughs across the furrowed fields, sparkling
with froft, to where on the horizon blazed the tre¬
mendous conflagration of sunset.

He enjoyed the walk back from the Wilderness as
much as the Wilderness itself; through the gate and
paft the fountain, and down the narrow path, ankle
deep in thyme, to the rustic bridge. Then came the
shrubbery, with jts moss-house and alders, and then
up to the Cliff, where he would flop to get his breath.
It was not really a cliff, but a ridge overlooking the
valley of the Ouse. Cowper would ftand with the
wind blowing the hair about his face Glaring across
the glittering loops of the river, far away into the hazy
distance towards Steventon; then his eye would rove
round, pausing for a moment, maybe, where the smoke
rose from a thatched roof solitary in the middle of an
elm wood.

The Peasants’ Ne^l,” as he called it, had always
caught his imagination. He liked to fancy himself
living there—a rustic hermit, alone with birds, animals
and trees. With pensive eyes he gazed; then with a

171 Life of Cowper

half-smile he would remind himself that he had once
visited the cottage and found it extremely uncom¬
fortable, with no water supply. It was the healthy
side of Cowper’s self-diifruft that it never allowed his
imagination to become self-indulgent or self-deceptive,
as the romantic imagination was so often tempted to
be. With modest amusement he would prick the
bubble of his daydream, and turn towards home.

He spent even more time in the garden than in
walking. It was not juft when he was gardening—he
liked to sit there as well. At firft this was a little
difficult. The narrow ftrip of ground, closed in as it
was by high walls, was insufferably hot if it was sunny,
and if it was not sunny it was cold. But it was
intolerable to be forced to spend a lovely morning in
the ftuffy parlour, diftrafted by the ftreet noises.
No wonder he hankered after the seclusion of the
‘‘Peasants* Neft.** Then one day in 1780 he con¬
ceived the idea of taking the plants out of the green¬
house and sitting there. He hung the wall with mats,
put down a carpet, a table and a comfortable chair,
and arranged a little row of myrtles in pots at the
entrance to serve as a sunblind. Thenceforth he sat
there morning, afternoon and evening, from May to
the end of September. These summer days in the
greenhouse were the pleasanteft in the whole year to
him. Whenever he speaks of them the sentences
begin to lilt and dance as to some sylvan orcheftra of
piping birds and ruftling leaves.

“We have not envied you,*’ he writes to Bull away
on a visit. “ Why should we envy any man } Is not
our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes ? It is at
this moment fronted with carnations and balsams,
mignonette and roses, jessamine and woodbine, and
wants nothing but your pipe to make it truly Arabian,
a wilderness of sweets.** And again, “ Our severeft
winter, commonly called the spring, is now over, and I

The Stricken Deer 172

find myself sitting in my favourite recess—the green¬
house. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where
no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles
presume to peep in at the window, you may suppose
I have no interruption to complain of, and that my
thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the
beauties of the spot are themselves an interruption,
my attention being called upon by those very myrtles,
by a row of grass pinks just beginning to blossom, and
by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to
consider it, if you please, as no small proof of my
regard, that though you have so many powerful rivals,
I disengage myself from them all and devote this
hour entirely to you/'

It was not odd that he liked it so much. It com¬
bined the two things to which he now looked for
happiness—domestic life and natural beauty. The
garden was only a few feet away from the noise and
sordid bustle of Silver End, but Cowper heard nothing
but birds and bees, saw nothing but flowers and waving
treetops. For all his senses could tell him, he might
have been in the depths of the country : indeed, it was
like a bit of the country—a plot of remote, leafy silence,
set as if by enchantment at his very door, where he
could escape from the harsh hurry of the world, and
where, as he sat through the placid hours, all the
troubles of his jangled nerves would dwindle to a
green thought in a green shade. And yet there was
none of the roughness of the really wild about it.
However fiercely the sun might beat down, it was
cool in the greenhouse; if a summer ^orm came up
the sky, all Cowper knew of it was a few claps of
thunder and a sudden sharp patter of rain on the roof
above his head. And the whole atmosphere of the
neat, old-fashioned garden, tended by his own hand,
and the neater little outdoor room, with its well-worn,
well-kept, well-remembered bits of furniture, and dear

173 ?/ Cowper

Mary within easy call, breathed cosy, cheerful, civilized
security. The different elements that go to give its
charafter to this phase of Cowper’s existence sum
themselves up in his garden life. If he rises before
our mental eye, it is in the greenhouse on some golden
September afternoon ; a tranquil figure writing at his
desk, with his linnets twittering in a cage above his
head, and the dog slumbering at his feet; while
outside the air is sweet with mignonette, and the
sunlight filters greenly in through the myrtle leaves,
and patterns itself on the carpeted floor.

It was a life before all things sequestered—a refuge, a
sanftuary, an escape. It is true that with his recovery
his interest in the great world and its doings had
returned. With what delighted expectation did he
open the ruStling folds of the newspaper ! With what
zest he read its contents and expounded them with
appropriate comments to Mary! The American War,
the Gordon Riots, the controversy over George III and
his Parliament—he had his views on them all. His point
of view was the typically respeCtable one of the period.
He was a Whig, nurtured in the tradition of 1688,
convinced that our Constitution was the culminating
achievement of an all-wise Creator; and George IITs
attempt to tamper with it Struck him as so much
sacrilege. On the other hand, he could not wholly
approve of Fox and the Opposition : not only were they
moSt unevangelical in their private lives, but they had
an unnatural tendency to take up the cause of foreigners.
For Cowper gloried in the name of Briton. The
Americans in his eyes were simply rebels againSt the
cause of God. As for the French, they were to him,
as. to moSt of his contemporaries, the despicable swarm
of grinning, poSturing f^rogs, as we see in Hogarth’s
piClure of Calais Gate; three of whom any Englishman
ought to overcome single-handed. If they defeated
us in the war it could only be through treachery; and

The Stricken Deer

17+

their typical representative was Ve^lris, the professional
dancer, Veftris, whose unmanly prancings had roused
all Paris to frenzies of enthusiasm. For such people
Cowper could only feel contempt. This jaunty
Chauvinism sits oddly on his nervous, complex
character.

Yet for all his outward excitement, he was not deeply
interefted in politics. His attitude was that of the
spcftator seeking diversion rather than that of the
interested aftor. As he said to Newton, “ You will
suppose me a politician, but in reality I am nothing
less. These are the thoughts that occur to me when I
read the newspaper, and when I have laid it down I
feel more interested in the success of my early cucum¬
bers than in any part of this great and important
subject. If I see them droop a little I forget we have
been many years at war.’* His interest in books was
similarly limited. He read a great deal, both to
himself and aloud to Mary—on summer afternoons
in the greenhouse, and by the crackling winter fire.
But he would not read anything philosophical—it
demanded too serious an attention—or poetry—it com¬
peted with his serious work. No, what he liked was
something pidturesque and full of incident—Claren¬
don’s History of the Rebellion or. Still better. Captain
Cookes Voyages, “ My imagination,” he remarks of
the laSt, ” is so captivated that I seem to partake with
the navigators in all the dangers they encountered.
I lose my anchor, my mainsail is rent into shreds, I
kill a shark, I converse with a Patagonian ; and all this
without moving from the fireside.” The truth was
he had never so far recovered his mental health as to
lose that horror of the world that had originally inspired
him to leave it. Even if Olney had no very pleasant
associations for him, it was yet a haven ; and the very
idea of being sent back into the whirlpool of aftive
life made him shudder. Only now and again, by way

175 °J (^owper

of varying the monotony of his daily round, he liked
to take a look, as in a magic mirror hanging in the
recesses of his sandluary, at the pageant of the great
world, paft and present, moving now bright, now
dark, before him. When he had seen enough, he
covered it up and returned to the comfortable reality
of the garden and the hares and Mary.

But the dangers that his mode of life was primarily
designed to avoid were those that came not from the
crowd, but from solitude. He wished to escape the
pressure of this world, it is true, but, far more impera¬
tively, the pressure of the next. Not that he had
ceased to be an Evangelical. Every idea or event or
practice he heard or read of was weighed in the
‘‘ experiential ” scale—weighed and generally found
wanting. Public schools, foreign travel, rouge, bal¬
looning—did they further the cause of God .? On the
whole, he thought not. Ballooning was, he admitted,
a difficult question. There was nothing morally
wrong about it, but he could not believe that God,
Who had given man two legs to walk with and had
created the earth to use them on, could really approve
of his negle«fting these endowments to career about
the sky in a machine of his own invention. The
question of rouge presented no such difficulties. It
could only be used from two motives—to deceive or
to attraft the male, and either, though perhaps pardon¬
able in a wretched unenlightened French-woman, must
be reprehended in an English lady. But indeed
England was now wallowing in a slough of vice and
luxury. It was an additional reason for retirement
if one was needed. The way the Sabbath was broken
—and by the moil diilinguished people in the land,
the Duke of York and the Duchess of Devonshire—
made him shudder. But even their shortcomings did
not rouse him to such angry eloquence as did the
growing prevalence of sacred music. He had it for a

The Stricken Deer ij 6

faft that a London clergyman gave concerts in his
church on Sunday afternoons—concerts without words.
“ I believe that wine itself, though a man be guilty of
habitual intoxication, does not more debauch or befool
the natural understanding than music, always music;
music in season and out of season, weakens and
destroys the spiritual discernment, if it is not done in
an unfeigned reverence to the worship of God and
with a design to assiSt the soul in the performance of it,
which cannot be when it is the only occupation—it
degenerates into a sensual delight.*’

And he had heard, too, that a lady, anxious to
dissuade her daughter from indulging in the dangerous
delight of walking in Ranelagh, called in this very
clergyman to support her, and he had aftually said
in front of the daughter that he saw no harm in it.
Such were the alarming results of promoting Sunday
concerts ! As for the Handel Festival at WeSlminSter
Abbey, Cowper did not know whether it made him
laugh or cry. That a number of people, all in danger
of eternal damnation, should colleft together and sing
about it, that they should do it in honour of a music-
monger, a fellow sinner like themselves, and that they
should do it in a church, was beyond any folly that he
could have dreamed of. Newton sought to recall these
people to a sense of their true situation by preaching a
course of sermons on the words of “ The Messiah.”
Cowper applauded his intention ; but he could not
expert it would do much good. Clearly the American
War was a judgment inflifted on England for her
wickedness. But was it a sufficient punishment ?
When he thought of the sacred concerts and the
Handel Festival, Cowper began to doubt it. Only
final perdition seemed adequate to such offences
And indeed, in the summer of 1785 he thought there
were great signs that it was not long to be delayed.
The weather was unnaturally bluffy, he saw several

177 ?/ Cowper

shooting ^lars, and the moon shone dull and small like
‘‘a red-hot brick.’’ Such phenomena could not be
without significance. Altogether, he felt he would not
be surprised if the world came to an end before the
year was out.

But though he ftill judged mankind by Evangelical
ftandards and envisaged his future in the light of
Evangelical ideas, the religious conceptions which
underlay these ideas he tried as far as possible to
forget. His Evangelicalism was ethical: it consisted
wholly of ethical judgments on men and events; it
expressed itself in an easy, conversational ilyle,
altogether different from the Biblical phraseology, the
fiery emphasis, that had charafterized his utterances
in the days of his conversion. The purely religious
aspefts of his creed ever since his illness he had striven,
with the pertinacity of desperation, to put out of his
head. He would not go to church or attend family
prayers ; and when others Siood with bowed heads
during grace, he sat down, knife and fork in hand,
deliberately averting his mind from the subjefl:.
Newton wanted him to write a book about religion,
but Cowper told him that though he did not mind
making short references to the subjeft in verse, he
simply could not let his mind dwell on it for as long as
would be needed for a prose work. And if people
tried to talk about it to him, or argue about it in his
presence, he first tried to change the subjeft, and
if that failed, left the room. For of course there
was a reverse side to the homely monotony of his
life—a reverse side of blackest horror. Within the
centre of his consciousness remained unaltered the
conviftion that he was damned, that every day that
passed brought him a day nearer to an eternity of
torment; and he had fixed his eyes exclusively on
such things as could Still give him pleasure, had
laboriously devised from them the whole elaborate

N

The Stricken Deer 178

scheme of occupation and habit and amusement which
was his mode of life, in order to di^lradf himself from
the frightful fate that awaited him. But the certainty
of that fate remained like a dark pit in the grassy
garden world of his every day.

He looked at it as little as possible, but sometimes
he could not help it. One day, for example, when he
was in the garden, he heard an old breeches-maker who
lived in a neighbouring cottage, singing at his work.

“ Oh, for a closer walk with God,

A pure and heavenly frame,”

he sang in aged, quavering tones,

“ A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb.”

It was one of Cowper’s own hymns ; and as he liilened
he recalled with an anguished twinge of regret how
trusting and hopeful he had been when he wrote it.
Now he trusted and hoped no longer^ and never would
again. Others might take comfort from the words:
they only made their author more sadly conscious of his
own despair.

He had other moments of more sensational depres¬
sion ; in winter especially, when he sat for weeks
together, cooped up in that dark, poky house, with the
rain drumming on the panes outside and nothing
to keep his mind from brooding on itself. January
was the woril month, January, that included the
anniversary of, the awful dream that had finally shut
him out from hope. His sick, suspicious nerves
fancied that there was something fatal to them in the
month; and for weeks before his heart would be beating
in an agony of apprehension. Would he go mad
again in January ? When he thought about it
rationally such a fear seemed nonsensical; but he
could not ^lop it from worrying him. Until February

179

was safely begun he was in a fever. In these moments
of discouragement Cowper turned once more to Mary.
Calmly and unobtrusively as ever, shd bore his burden,
and in time it passed. But he was never so far
recovered as to face his fears and have them out and
examine them in the light of reason. He would not
liften to argument. Mary, Newton, Bull—all his
friends—reasoned with him and reasoned again, in
vain. In 1782, Newton, optimistic as usual, sought
to see if the force of example would have more success,
and wrote Cowper a letter describing the Strange case
of Simon Browne. This was a Nonconformist preacher
residing in London during the earlier years of the
century, who, like Cowper, had, for no sensible reason,
become convinced he was damned. He made every
effort to escape his fate, even going so far as to write
to Queen Caroline asking her to intercede with God
on his behalf; as he felt that a person of her exalted
rank would have more chance than a nobody like
himself of engaging the attention of an overworked
Creator. Whether the Queen granted his requeSt we
do not know. It would have been a great favour on
her part if she had, as she was more than half an
atheist. At any rate, the prayer was not granted, and
poor Mr. Browne died without hope. Newton
thought that the patent absurdity of his Story would
lead Cowper to realize the eq[ual absurdity of his own.
However, Cowper only replied with polite acrimony
that the cases were different. “ I could point out to
vou/’ he said, “ some essential differences between
his State of mind and mine which would prove mine to
be by far the moSt deplorable. I suppose no man
would despair if he did not apprehend something
singular in the circumstances of his own Story, some¬
thing that discriminates it from that of every other
man/' This was always the burden of his case: he
was unique. As he says on another occasion : “ My

The Stricken Deer

i8o

friends expeft I shall see again. I admit the validity
of this reasoning in every case but my own.'^ The
truth was that about this particular subjeft he was
ifill mad, the vid:im of an obsession—an obsession
which blinded him to reason or common sense. The
pit remained dark in the middle of the garden, and
he StiW walked round it with averted eyes.

His condition of mind reflefts itself in his letters
and poems. The letters are the beft things he ever
wrote, the finest achievement of one who had culti¬
vated to the higheft point of perfection a natural genius
for intimacy. They are unpretentious—he hated
consciously well-written letters, and even thought that
a letter should be destroyed after the recipient had read
it—but they are not in the lea^l like notes dashed off
in the intervals of a busy life. They are composed in
a lucid, unforced, graceful English—the very per¬
fection of the plain ^yle, by no means to be attained
in a hurry. Every corner is rounded : there are no
abrupt transitions: the briefest note begins and ends
with a charming, easy turn of phrase. They are
beautifully differentiated, to suit the temperament of
his correspondent; serious to Newton, sensible to Hill,
playful and confiding to Unwin. They do not tell
much news, for there was little to tell; but rather
follow whatever whims and thoughts happened to
chase each other across Cowper’s mind as he sat in the
garden, or by the candle-lit table on a winter's evening.
No letters show such variety of mood. The stream of
sparkling, limpid sentences flows on, now in sunshine,
now in shadow; and now it dimples in humour, now
lingers sombre under the shade or melancholy boughs.

The poems are not so good as the letters, but they
reveal other things about Cowper, One realizes from
them that he was an amateur who wrote as a di^lraCfion.
Only very rarely do his verses attain that complete
felicity of expression, that indissoluble marriage of

i8i

Lije of Cowfier

word and thought that characterizes the work of those
to whom their art is the undisputed centre and fulfilment
of existence. But when he speaks about any subjeft
he cares about the authentic accents of poetry come
into his voice; and as his peculiar mode of life had
given him tables not common among poets, he had a
real vein of his own. His is almoil the only domeilic
poetry : “ I sing the sofa,*' begins his moft considerable
poem, and the line might ifand advertisement to one
whole aspeft of his achievement. He sung the sofa,
of the respeftable country home of his day, and the
tea-table by the sofa, and the chc^l of drawers opposite
the sofa, and, leaning againil the sofa, the chessboard
with its carven armies, and the gay needlework on the
sofa cushions and the woolly lap-dog that leapt up from
them to bark at an intruder. The animals he loved
play a large part in his poetry. He writes fables about
them—The Dog and the Water-lily," " The Retired
Cat "—fables which are made to point a neat moral, but
which vividly portray the peculiar tricks and idiosyn¬
crasies of their furred or feathered protagonists.
Turning to human beings, he is Still domestic; writes
lively occasional verses to Mary, on a nosegay he had
picked for her, or to Newton, on his return from
Ramsgate, celebrates in mock ballad Style the mis-
ad v^entures of a muddy walk. With gentle, penetrating
satire he painted the bores who come to call—the
emphatic speaker who “ dearly loves to oppose, in
contact inconvenient, nose to nose." Or the wearisome
tellers of anecdote :

“ ’Tis the mo^l asinine employ on earth
To hear them tell of parentage and birth
And echo conversations dull and dry
Embellished with ‘ he said ’ and ‘ so said
At every interview their route the same.

The repetition makes attention lame.

We bullle up with unsuccessful speed
And at the saddeft part cry—Droll indeed 1 ”

The Stricken Deer

182

Or sometimes, his voice changing to a tenderer tone,
he will sing for a while the simple afFeftions and sorrows
of family life. Such writing may never glow with the
white-hot temperature of the greatest poetry; but its
author has caught an aspeft of life not often touched on
by poets and cry^allized it into art.

Cowper writes beautifully of Nature too. With
exquisite precision he isolates the charafteriftic features
of the landscape, “the clouds that flit or slowly float
away,”

“ Hypericum all bloomSy so thick a swarm
Of flowers like flies clothing her slender rods.”

The streams that

“ . . . chiming as they fall
Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length
In matted grass that with a livelier green
Betrays the secret of their silent course/'

Or the robin in winter

“ . . . flitting light

From spray to spray. Where’er he re^s he shakes
From many a twig the pendant drops of ice
That tinkle in the withered leaves below.”

No other writer has “ caught the charafter of the
landscape of southern England so exaftly. And yet
Cowper is never consciously English, as some later
writers have been. He describes England because he
wants to describe the country, and it is the only
country he knows. He does not even bother about an
appropriately ru^ic style, but employs the formal
Miltonic didlion he had been brought up to think
correft for serious poetry. Yet this seems to make
his descriptions all the more genuine, as the water¬
colours or his contemporaries Girtin and Cozens, for
all their conventionalized Style of drawing, their faded
classical graces, communicate the spirit of the English

183 Life of Cowper

countryside as the life-like snapshots of later impression-
ifts never do. It is the visitor who notices local terms
and typical “ bits : the inhabitant knows the place
too well to be conscious of such external features.

Cowper writes well, too, when he gives rein to the
ebullience of his florid eighteenth-century patriotism,
the gallant ftirrings of emotion roused in him by some
heroic event or personage :

“ Weigh the vessel up
Once dreaded by our foes
And mingle with your cup
The tears that England owes.

Her timbers yet arc sound
And she may float again
Full charged with England’s thunder
And plough the di^ant main.”

But Kempenfelt has gone,

His vidlories are o’er,

And he and his eight hundred
Mu^ plough the waves no more.”

Is there not a fine martial clang about that }

But now and again, misled by conscience, a moil
unreliable guide in aesthetic matters, Cowper adopts a
tone of religious reprobation, girds againil the wicked¬
ness of the world and summons people to throw them¬
selves upon the mercy of God. Inimediately all the
light fades from the page, and it becomes pompous,
wordy and uninspired. For Cowper has left the
realm of his real feelings. Though he ilill thinks
Chriilianity true, he has ceased to feel anything for
it; he does not care a pin if the world is wicked or
good. As for the mercy of God, as far as he himself
is concerned he profoundly disbelieves in it. He may
tell people they ought to think of such subjefts, but
they are the subjefts that he spends his whole life
trying to forget.

The Stricken Deer 184

With growing success. The ordered life of Olney
was so unvaried, each day so exactly like the laft, that
often it seemed to him that time was ^landing ftill.
But in reality it hurried all the fabler. A year there
passed as quickly as a week of more diverse exigence.
“ My days fteal away silently,'* he said, “ and march
on as poor mad King Lear would have made his
soldiers march, as if they were shod with felt.” And
with time came change. Beneath the level, uniform
surface went on a fteady, persiftent process of altera¬
tion. Cowper was regaining his mental health. Not
that he was getting more amenable to reason : if you
argued with him he likened as little as ever : but other
forces than reason were working for his recovery.
Gradually, healthily, the movement begun in 1776
was advancing, his natural vitality was re-asserting
itself with a growing force. He felt no sudden change
of mind or conviftion ; he simply began to think more
and more about the outside world and less and less
about his own internal problems. The pit remained
unillumined ; but it was diminishing in area, and grass
and trees were encroaching on its slopes. In 1779
his predominant condition had been one of dull despair
varied by fits of anguish and rarer snatches of enjoy¬
ment ; by 1780 these moments recurred often enough
for him to conftruft a relatively normal system of life
around them, and he had glimpses of an altogether
more light-hearted condition of mind. ” I wonder
that a sportive thought should ever knock at the doors
of my intelleft, much less gain admittance,” he re¬
marks to Unwin. ” It is as if Harlequin should
intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse
is deposited in ftate. His antic gesticulations would
be unseasonable at any rate, but especially so if they
should distort the features of the mournful attendants
into laughter. But the mind long wearied with tho
sorrow of a dull, dreary prospeft will gladly fix its

185 Life of Cowper

eyes on anything that will raise a little variety in its
contemplation, though it were but a kitten playing with
its tail. By 1781 happiness had become the rule
rather than the exception. His fits of aftual anguish
were few, and in between whiles their memory caft
only a faint shadow over his life. He was further
taken out of himself by the publication of his fir^l
book. Cowper always denied he was ambitious, said
he only wrote for pleasure and did not care what
the critics said. Indeed, how should he care, seeing
that he was only too painfully aware that all the
glories of the world were vanity } But in faft when
his book was accepted by a publisher he could not con¬
tain his pleasure ; and when it firft appeared before
the public, he was in an agony of apprehension as to
how it would be received. Of course he had really
a large fund of natural ambition which he had always
repressed, partly in consequence of bad health, but
ilill more because he was convinced he was born to be
a failure. He said he did not care for honours, because
he feared he was never going to get them. Aftually,
though his fir^ book made no great ^lir,it was decidedly
no failure; and his growing interest and pleasure in
life were so far encouraged. However, before the
book was out another force had come into his life that
was to afFeft him more profoundly.

One afternoon in July 1781 Cowper was faring
idly out of the parlour window when his attention was
caught by the sight of two ladies emerging from the
bulging, bow-windowed little draper's shop opposite.
One he knew : she was Mrs. Jones, wife of the clergy¬
man of the neighbouring village of Clifton. Her
companion was unknown to him. But there was
something about her appearance by which he was
immediately and ftrangely attrafted. Moved by an
impulse foreign to his usual retiring character, he
besought Mrs, Unwin to find out who the lady was,

The Stricken Deer

i86

and ask them both in to tea. She complied; the
invitation was accepted; and the unknown proved
to be Mrs. Jones* siller, a Lady Auilen, widow of a
baronet called Sir Robert Au^en. Now that the
objeft of his interest was aftually in the house Cowper*s
mood underwent a ftrong reaftion. He became even
shyer than usual, lingered for several minutes outside
the parlour door trying to screw up enough courage
to go in; and when at length he did so was so over¬
come with confusion that he could barely Klammer
out the firft formal words of greeting. A few minutes'
talk with Lady Au^len, however, and all his embarrass¬
ment had vanished. She had an easy, intimate manner,
and a vivid, responsive personality. Her dark eyes
sparkled with laughter at the leail hint of humour,
softened with concern at a suggestion of sorrow. And
her own contributions to the conversation were alive
with shrewdness, wit and infectious gaiety. She
seemed to take to Cowper at once; when she rose to
go it was with many protestations of hope that they
would meet again. Cowper was only too willing.
Not only was she far and away the moSt dazzling figure
that had appeared at Olney for years, but he felt her
peculiarly sympathetic to himself. And the very
next day he and Mary were trudging along the water
meadows, thick with yellow irises, towards Clifton.
Their visit led to a return visit to Olney; and soon the
rigid ritual of Cowper’s existence, unvaried for twelve
years, was broken up in favour of a succession of
engagements to walk and dine and drink tea in the
company of the ladies of Clifton ReCtory. They even
had a picnic. It was a decorous kind of picnic. At
mid-day the ladies and Cowper Started off to walk
about a mile to a spinney, where, suitably waited on
by their servants, they had dinner in a summer-house.
But a masked ball could hardly have been a more
sensational variation to Cowper’s usual course of life.

187 Lije of Cowper

He enjoyed himself immensely. “ Lady Auften's
lackey and a lad that waits on me in the garden drove
a wheelbarrow full of eatables and drinkables to the
scene of our JSte champStre. A board laid over the
wheelbarrow served us for a table; our dining-room
was a root house lined with moss and ivy. At five
o'clock the servants dined under a great elm on the
grass at a little di^ance, boiled the kettle, and the
said wheelbarrow served us for a tea-table. We then
took a walk into the wilderness about half a mile off,
and arrived home again a little after eight. We had
spent the day together from noon to evening without
one cross occurrence or the leail weariness of one
another—a happiness few parties of pleasure can boaft
of." In the pleasant warmth of such gentle gaieties
Cowper's and Lady Auften’s early liking for each other
ripened into a close friendship; and by the end of
the summer she was talking of selling her house in
London and coming to live with Mary and Cowper
at Olney.

Throughout the whole affair she had been the
aftive party. One cannot, indeed, imagine her
passive in anything. She was all quick-silver and elec¬
tricity, a live, high-ilrung, compelling personality,
with an intense desire to please and considerable
powers of doing so. Though she was not at all
uncultivated, people were the principal interest of
her life. She was quick to sum up character, to deteft
foibles, to appreciate charm and originality, to get into
the key of another's mood, to say the things that pleased,
to avoid the things that jarred. And her feelings
were as responsive as her mind. She could not be
in company without her spirits rising in a bubbling
fount of vivacity; the smallest service would fill her
eyes with tears of gratitude. When she took a fancy
to someone it was immediately and enthusiaftically.
She had the defers of her qualities. She was over-

The Stricken Deer

i88

excitable, indulged her emotions, liked to dramatize
her life, to see herself as the heroine of a situation.
And like mo^l people whose charm is an important
factor in their lives, she was an egoi^l: demon-
ftrative herself, she exafted demonstrations from
her friends; and though she forgave easily she was
easily hurt. She had been married and widowed
young, and since then had divided her time between
London and France. And she had all the polish and
experience that come from so varied an existence.
But at the time she appears in Cowper’s Story she was in
strong reaction against the great world. She had
seen much of the world and accounted it a great
simpleton,’’ said Cowper. For the time being, at any
rate, she was in love with the pleasures of retirement;
and it was in pursuit of them she professed to have
come to ftay with her si^er and brother-in-law. But
she was too young, too energetic, and too exclusively
interefted in people, to be genuinely attracted by a life
of self-sufficient seclusion; and the truth was that
she had come to the country because she was rest¬
less. She had no settled position and no responsi¬
bilities and nothing to do. She was ready to throw
herself into the firSt friendship that came her way.
Cowper, too, was the very man to attrafl her. He
had always had great charm £or women, and Lady
AuSlen was far too quick to be put off by his stiff
provincial manner. Indeed in her present mood
it only added to the attraction she felt. Cowper
incarnated for her the happiness of country solitude,
so preferable to the buStling, Strident vanity of the
world she had left. Her inflammable fancy caught
fire the moment she met him; and she devoted all her
arts and energies to cementing the connection.

He seconded her willingly. The romantic glow
which had haloed her figure when he firSt caught sight
of it out of the window had not faded on closer acquaint-

189 Lije oj Cowper

ance. He was by temperament peculiarly susceptible
to the subtle sweetness, the intimacy, the feminine
shimmer, of an accomplished, charming woman; and
this susceptibility had been sharpened by the faft that
for many years he had seen so little of them. Lady
Au^len was a lot of other things he liked as well—
vital, spontaneous, humorous, and tender-hearted.
Nor, with all her arts and experience, did he feel her
to belong to a different and more worldly exigence
than he did. If he talked of serious suWefts she
immediately became admirably serious herself; and he
was pleased to find that she disapproved of Sunday
concerts as much as he did. It is possible that her
views became drifter when she was with Cowper.

But at moments he felt a little nervous, a little self-
conscious, about his relationship to her. It was
certainly delightful, but very unlike any that he had
ever had with anyone before: and he was not at all
sure what it might lead to, or what other people might
think of it. With a comic anxiety he assures and
reassures his correspondents that she is quite as much
Mrs. Unwin’s friend as his own, that he likes her in
great part because she is so fond of Mrs. Unwin.
What Mrs. Unwin herself felt is not so clear. The
summer had been certainly more amusing than usual,
and Lady Auften, charming to everyone, was especially
charming to her : she was not likely to be anything else
to Cowper’s closed friend. But Mary muft have felt
that the charafter of their lives, of their time-honoured
tfete-k-tSte, would be enormously changed by the
addition of a third, especially such a lively third. It
is hard to believe that she regarded the idea with
unmixed feelings. Certainly William Unwin, to
whom the whole affair was communicated, was
dubious. He wrote to say that he had heard Lady
Auften’s financial position was uncertain, and that
they ought moil emphatically to find out about it before

The Stricken Deer

190

engaging themselves to her, anyway. Cowper wrote
back a vehement letter assuring him that her financial
position was impeccable; and added that he was in
Favour of her coming to live in Olney chiefly because
it would be so much pleasanter for Mrs. Unwin to
have a woman friend near at hand. Anyway, he
wound up. Lady Auften would not be able to come
for nearly two years, so that there was no need to get
excited about it. Indeed for the moment the whole
affair remained vague; and in October Lady Au^en
went back to London. Before she left she proposed
that Cowper and she should open a regular correspond¬
ence. It was to be with him rather than with Mary,
he carefully explained to William Unwin, “ because
writing does not agree with your mother.” Lady
Auften also suggefted that they should address eacn
other as brother and siiler. Cowper was quite willing;
it seemed to place their relationship on an admirably
safe and sensible basis, encouraging to intimacy, dis¬
couraging to dangerous sentimentality. Alas, he was
wrong I It is one thing when a woman asks a man to
look on her as a siller after he has made love to her.
It is quite another when she does it before. In the
present instance it was nothing less than the thin end
of the wedge of love. Any vague apprehensions that
Cowper may have felt at the beginning of his con¬
nexion with Lady AuXen were to be juXified. Week
after week he wrote and she replied; and gradually, to
his horror, a more impassioned note began to creep
into her Xyle.

One cannot blame her. Cowper’s position in
regard to such matters was so queer. Passion had
always been foreign to him; and now mental troubles
and his association with Mary together put any
idea of a love affair quite out of the question. On the
other hand, the only relationship he cared to cultivate

191 Lije oj Cowper

with anyone was an intimate and tender friendship;
and it is almost impossible for an unattached man and
woman to live in intimate and tender friendship
without one of the two beginning to look on it as a
dawning love affair. The very faft that Cowper was
so little open to passion made this more likely, for he
was careless how far he pressed the intimacy. He felt
no danger himself, and so could not remember that she
might not feel the same. For all his shy good-breed¬
ing, his manner towards women was remarked on for
its “ tender gallantry.** He had the kind of tempera¬
ment that always prefers a tSte-k-tfite to a general
conversation. He singled out the objeft of his intereft
by a thousand small personal attentions, small personal
solicitudes, small personal confidences. He loved to
laugh with her at some joke private to themselves, to
recall with sentiment some memory they shared
together.

All this was bound to make a difficulty in any
friendship he had with a woman; but the circumstances
of his connexion with Lady AuSlen made these diffi¬
culties peculiarly acute. He saw her as a glittering
goddess who had suddenly descended from a sky-
borne chariot to illuminate his drab life, and this made
him feel his relationship to be different not in degree
but in kind from any other he had known. This
feeling appeared in every word he said to her.

“ Dear Anna,** he writes to her in December,

“ Dear Anna, between friend and friend
Prose answers every common end,

Serves, in a plain and homely way,

T’ express th’ occurrence of the day—

Our health, the weather and the news.

What walks we take, what books we choose,

And all the floating thoughts we find
Upon the surface of the mind.

The Stricken Deer

192

But when a Poet takes the pen,

Far more alive than other men,

He feels a gentle tingling come
Down to his finger and his thumb,

Derived from Nature’s nobleft part.

The centre of a glowing heart!

And this is what the world, who knows
No flights above the pitch of prose.

His more sublime vagaries slighting.
Denominates an itch for writing.

No wonder, I, who scribble rhyme
To catch the triflers of the time
And tell them truths divine and clear
Which couch’d in prose they will not hear,

Should feel that itching and that tingling
With all my purpose intermingling.

To your intrinsic merit true.

When called t’ address myself to you.”

This is not quite a love poem, but it is very near
to one. And it expresses cxaftly the ilate of Cowper’s
feelings. In a respeftable, rarified sort of way, he was
a flirt. He did not wish, as we know, a declared love
affair; indeed, he avoided it. But he preferred a
personal relationship that involved a slightly raised
emotional tension, that moved in an atmosphere tinged
with half-hidden, half-hinted romantic sentiment.

Lady Auften’s ardent temperament understood
no such half shades. She did not aftually make a
confession of her love to him; indeed, she may not
actually have confessed it to herself. But she answered
his hints of sentimental regard with open proteSlatioas
of affeftion; and finally, early in January, he got a
letter from her in which, after celebrating his virtues
in a Strain of lyrical rhapsody, she ended by prophesying
their friendship would attain a culmination of unique
and supreme felicity in the near future. Poor
Cowper became very agitated. Clearly he would have
to do something at once to damp this rising flame ; but

193 Cowper

it was an embarrassing task. She was so touchy.
Only a few weeks before, she had taken violent offence
at some slighting reflection she professed to have found
in one of his letters; and he had been forced to write
an elaborate apology and explanation before she was
pacified. He hardly dared to think what her feelings
would be if he ventured openly to rebuke her. How¬
ever, her wrath was a less disturbing alternative than
her love, and, sighing, he sat down at his table and
composed a letter. It was in a lofty vein. Solemnly,
he bade her remember that he was an erring mortal;
that by exaggerating his perfections she was in danger
of falling into the sin of idolatry ; and, starting off with
such false hopes, a closer acquaintance with him would
certainly fill her with disappointment. It is to be
doubted whether a strain or apocalyptic exhortation
is that beSt fitted in which to deal with the fragile
affairs of the heart. Mary, it is true, thought Cowper's
letter admirable; but she may have had her own
reasons for approving of it.

Not so Lady Auilen : nor did she. She was even
angrier than Cowper had feared. Within a few days
he got a letter back from her, of such a violent kind that
he could only suppose she had made up her mind to
sever their connection for ever. He stifled a few
involuntary pangs of regret and resigned himself to
the inevitable. After all, there was a brighter side
to the affair. It might have been a great strain to
have her always in the house. She was so very
vivacious. He remembered that, in some ways, it
had been quite a relief when she went away in OCtober.
He and Mary had felt exhausted at having to
maintain a level of conversation so persistently
sparkling.

Meanwhile, however, Lady AuSten’s volatile feel¬
ings had suffered a revulsion. Her wrath had died
down as quickly as it had flared up. And now she
o

The Stricken Deer

194

could only remember how much she liked Cowper, and
seek about for some means of making it up with him.
She had been working three pairs of ruffles tor him, and
by way of opening negotiations she sent them to him
by the hand of her brother-in-law. Cowper could not
restrain his pleasure at this sign of goodwill. He did
not thank her direftly, but he asked Mr. Jones to do
so: and to show that, for his part, he bore her no
malice, he sent her in return a long-promised copy of
his firft book. But his cooler temperament could
not so soon forget the pail: his peaceful disposition
was nervous of reopening a connexion liable to such
ilorms. This diffidence was increased by the next
news he heard of Lady Auilen.

“ She is to spend the summer in our neighbour¬
hood,” he wrote. “ Lady Peterborough and Miss
Mordaunt are to be of the party : the former a dissi-

E ated woman of fashion, and the latter a haughty
eauty. Retirement is our passion and our delight.
It is in ilill life alone that we look for that measure of
happiness we can rationally expeft below. What have
we, therefore, to do with charafters like these } Shall
we go to the dancing school again } Shall we ca^l
off the simplicity of our plain and artless demeanour to
learn—and not in a youthful day either—the manners of
those whose manners at the be^l are their only recom¬
mendation, and yet can in reality recommend them to
none but the people like themselves i ”

It was very sad. Enchanting creature though Anna
might be, it was clear from the company she kept that,
contrary to his firil impression, her background was
too different from his for their friendship ever to reSt
on a firm basis. Essentially he feared she belonged
to another world, even if she did disapprove of Sunday
concerts.

Still, there were signs that he had not completely
resigned himself to her loss. William Unwin had

195 9 f Cowper

taken advantage of the formal reconciliation to go and
inspect her for himself, under cover of a call of courtesy.
It is significant that he was disappointed in her, and told
Cowper that she was strange and iliff in her manner
towards him. Immediately, Cowper blazed up in her
defence. There muil have been some misunder-
ftanding, he wrote; she was ordinarily moft forth¬
coming. It was no good: he could not conceal the
faft that he liked her, that he longed for her friendship
again.

His longings were satisfied. There was no more
talk of Miss Mordaunt and Lady Peterborough—
baleful priestesses of the Moloch of fashionable life.
In the summer Lady AuSten came back to Clifton alone;
and within a few days of her arrival she had hurried
over to Orchard Side, rushed into the house, and
fiung herself with a torrent of smiles and tears into
Mary’s arms. She had come determined on peace.
She explained, she apologized, she forgave, she
captivated; and Mary herself admitted that there
was no resisting her. Before the visit was over they
were once more, officially at leaSt, on the terms of the
previous summer. Cowper and Mary did, indeed,
feel a little awkward, but Lady AuSten did not; and
after a few weeks’ constant intercourse they did not
either. The quarrel was as forgotten as if it had never
taken place. There was no doubt it was more amusing
when she was there. Once again the monotony of
their daily round was brightened by a ceaseless course
of gentle diversion. Adtually they were prevented by
the weather from enjoying so many of the delightful
outdoor schemes, walks, expeditions and picnics as
they did laSI summer: there had not been such a
baa summer for years. During weeks together the
meadows between Olney and Clifton were in flood.
However, Lady Auften was not the woman to be
daunted by a trifle like that. She got hold of a

The Stricken Deer 196

donkey, and day after day, mounted on its back, she
splashed through the water to come and discuss and
joke and tell tales with her dear “ brother/* Even
when the weather made it impossible for them to meet,
she managed to brighten his life. She wrote to him,
and got him a small printing press; so that he could
while away the time in clumsily Clamping out, in
blurred, uncertain type, a letter or a copy of verses
for her.

The summer was not without its more sensational
incidents. One evening when Cowper was sitting
peacefully in the parlour he was ftartled by a knock at
the door ; and he rushed out to find Lady Auilen being
supported up the fteps, apparently in great pain. She
had come to OFney Church for the afternoon service,
and had suddenly been taken ill there. She was put
to bed, and a do6tor was sent for, who reported her to
be suffering'from “bilious colic.** Any one of a
bilious habit should be thankful that they do not live
in the eighteenth century ; for colics then seem to have
been formidable affairs. Twenty-four hours later,
after an afternoon in which Lady Austen had appeared
her usual lively self, Cowper was called into her room,
to find her in a violent fit of convulsive hyfterics.
However, this may not have been due to the sort of
illness so much as to her highly-ilrung temperament,
which could not but show itself, even in her ailments.
It would be fanciful as well as ungallant to sugge^ that
she was influenced by a desire that Cowper should
come in and comfort her. Anyway, two days later
she was well enough to ride back to Clifton on her
donkey.

So passed the summer; and now the autumn was
here. And Lady Au^len determined not to leave her
“ brother *’ again. But where was she to live } There
was no room for her in Orchard Side. However, as
usual, she had a plan. One evening, as they were

197 Cowper

sitting calmly at Clifton, she suddenly suggested
that they should all set up house in the deserted
Clifton Manor House. Cowper looked at her with
mingled fear and delight. That he and Mary should
break up the twenty-year-old order of their exigence
and ftart life in a new house at a month’s notice—
only Anna could have conceived of so fantaftically bold
an idea. Still, he could not help being attracted by
its very boldness ; and in his next letter he mentioned
it to William Unwin, in an airy, half-laughing way, as
if he were nervous that he might not like it. However,
William Unwin was less suspicious of Lady Au^len
than formerly. She had taftfully told Cowper that
she thought Mr. Unwin was the mo^i: elegant figure
she had ever seen: and Cowper had passed the
information on: which perhaps accounts for the
modification of William’s views. The scheme proved
imprafticable; but it was settled, instead, that Lady
Auften should take the Vicarage which was, of
course, quite near to Orchard Side, and which the
Vicar—a man of large family and small means—was
only too willing to let. In Oftober she moved in, and
for the next eighteen months it was her home.

She had got what she came for. Cowper and she
hardly spent a moment of the day apart. A door was
cut in the wall between the two gardens, and immedi¬
ately after breakfaft he walked across to “ pay his
respefts ” to her. Later she nearly always accom¬
panied him and Mary on their walk ; and sometimes,
when Mary was tired, Lady Au^en and Cowper went
alone. During the week they had dinner together
alternately at Orchard Side and the Vicarage ; they were
^lill sufficiently Evangelical to deny themselves such a
dissipation on Sunday. From dinner on they were
together till bed-time. Cowper enjoyed the change
in his life, “ Lady Au^len,” he told a correspondent,
“ was the clevereft and moil entertaining woman in the

The Stricken Deer

198

country.” Her wit and vitality doubled the amuse¬
ment he |;ot out of his ordinary relaxations—talking
and walking and reading aloud. And besides, she
could play deliciously on the harpsichord. His letters
begin to sparkle with gentle gaiety. “ How different
is the complexion of your evenings and mine I ” he said
to Joseph Hill. “ Yours spent amid a ceaseless hum
that proceeds from the inside of fifty noisy and busy
periwigs; mine by a domeftic fireside, in a retreat as
silent as retirement can make it, where no noise
but what we make for our own amusemen®**^”.^ <<
in^ance, here are two rustics and your humblf‘?^*^J*^
in company. One of the ladies has been pl^
the harpsichord, while I, with the other, h^'^ 9 % xn
playing at battledore and shuttlecock. A litdC' 5 [og, in
the meantime, howling under the chair of tie former,
performed in the vocal way to admiratpn. This
entertainment over, I began my letter aid, having
nothing more important to communicate, have given
you an account of it. I know you love (early to be
idle, when you can find the opportunity, to be so;
but as, such opportunities are rare with yC > I thought
it possible that a short description of tni idleness I
enjoy might give you pleasure. The ha^rpness we
cannot call our own, we ^et seem to poosess, wtiiji
we sympathize with our friends who can.”

In a word, his life was ftill as secluded from the rush o*
the outsideworld as he could desire. But Lady Auften’s
presence gave it a liveliness and a colour that made
him ten times stronger to resist his spiritual enemies.
For these had not ceased their attacks. Indeed, in the
autumn of 1782, Mary was in terror le^l he might go
mad again. Not only was the winter-time coming on
—always a dangerous time—but it was juft ten years
since his second attack; exaftly the same length of
time as had elapsed between that second attack and the
firft one. This was juft the sort of faft, as Mary,

199 Cowper

with her long experience of Cowper, well knew, to
send him mad. His mind was such an inchoate mass
of superstition and fear that if he thought it was time ^
for him to go mad again, he would do so.

Sure enough, as the autumn went on, Cowper was
seized with fits of gloom. In the middle of a con¬
versation he would suddenly fall silent: his jaw would
drop, and an expression of anguish would overcaSl his
features. With impotent dismay Mary watched him.
Her patient, tenacious, self-denying charafter, so
wonderfully able to give support in a tragic crisis, had
not the resource to forestall such a crisis by diverting
Cowper’s mind from the dangerous slopes it was
descending. However, Lady AuSlen had. One
evening, when he was particularly downcaSl, she
offered to tell a Story which, she said, had amused her
as a girl. Mary begged her to; but Cowper only
preserved a Stony silence. Undaunted she began, and
with all the spirit and humour she could muSter,
recounted the sad adventures that befell a linen-draper
of London in his efforts to celebrate the anniversary
of his wedding. Cowper listened to the firSt incidents
with his face Still fixed in an expression of dejection.
But Lady AuSten was nothing if not high-hearted.
She went on; within a few minutes a smile began to
Steal across Cowper’s face, and by the end of the Story
he was in peals of laughter, all the heartier from the
fa£t that they came as a readtion from profound
depression. He was so amused, in fadt, that he could
not sleep, but lay awake putting the Story into verse.
Next morning he read the verses aloud: this time it
was the ladies* turn to laugh. He retired to the green¬
house—it was Still early in Odtober—and set to work to
finish the poem. As he polished off each passage he
gleefully sent it across the way to provoke the laughter
of his rriend, Wilson, the barber. When the whole
thing was finished it was sent away and published in a

The Stricken Deer

200

broadsheet; and within a few days all London was
laughing over the ^lory of John Gilpin. Cowper was
delighted at its reception; but it gave him a slight
qualm too. He, who had hoped to shine through
the world as a light of the Gospel, had only succeeded
in becoming famous as the author of a comic poem.
He was ^lill more distressed to learn that his rivals
for the chief share of the public intereSl were the antics
of a performing pig and the unedifying confessions of
the notorious Mrs. Bellamy. “Alas! “ he said rue¬
fully, “ what is an author’s popularity worth in a world
which can suffer a proSlitute on one side, and a pig on
the other, to eclipse his brightest glories ? ” All the
same, he had reason to be grateful to John Gilpin, for
he had saved him from going mad. Owing to Lady
AuSten’s ta< 5 t, winter passed and spring, and he was
safely back in summer, without his spirits having passed
through anything worse than a mild melancholy.

She Stimulated him to write other things besides.
She often wanted words for music ; and Cowper would
employ a dull morning in composing a copy of verses
to be sung to the tune of “ The Lass of Pattie’s Mill,”
or “ The March in Scipio.” She believed Strongly
in his powers, and thought he could attempt something
more ambitious. One day he was declaiming again^
Pope’s translation of Homer: it was a favourite theme
with him.

“ Why don’t you write a translation yourself? ” she
said.

The idea sank into his mind and later bore fruit.
Another day she urged him to write something in
blank verse.

“ I have no 5ubjeft,” he said.

“ Write about anything,” she returned impetuously.
“ Write about the sofa.”

He took her at her word. And a few days later,
began a poem which Started, as required, about the

201 Life oj Cowper

sofa, but gradually blossomed into something bigger;
in faft, into the biggeft work he ever wrote: “The
Task,’* a long, meditative poem of several thousand
lines, into which he poured more or less at random the
chief conclusions and reflexions and observations that
remained to him from fifty-five years of troubled life.
His genius had always been meditative, and the subjeft
absorbed him as no other had. He grew happier
every day—happier, indeed, than he had been since his
laX illness. He felt all the sense of well-being and
self-satisfaftion that comes through regular, hard,
congenial work: and all the time he was not working
he spent delightfully talking and walking, reading and
eating and laughing with Lady AuXen. He hardly
had time to write a letter. “ Yours, more than I
have time to tell you,” he scribbles off to a corre¬
spondent. “ The ladies are in the greenhouse, and tea
waits.”

It was a delightful life; but it did not, it could not
laX. The circumXances that had made his relation¬
ship with Lady AuXen impossible fifteen months before
remained unchanged. It was no easier than it had been
then for a man and a woman to spend almoX every hour
of every day together for months without danger to the
deeper feelings of either. And while Xill avoiding the
boiling-point of passion, Cowper Xill liked to keep the
emotional temperature decidedly warmer than that of
mere friendship. Indeed, since he had safeguarded
his position by declaring it openly to her, he sailed
nearer the wind of a love affair than ever. He had
carefully explained to her that she should look on him
as an unromantic and imperfeft fellow mortal. He
had carefully explained to everybody else that she was
more Mary’s friend than his. Surely, therefore, he
need not fear any misunderstanding. But his tender
and gallant manner was juSt as tender and gallant as
before. Indeed, more so. He gave her a lock of his

The Stricken Deer

202

hair, and she had it set in a diamond brooch : and he
wrote some lines to celebrate the occasion:—

“ The Hat that beams on Anna’s breaft
Conceals her William’s hair,

*Twas lately severed from the reft
To be promoted there.

The heart that beats beneath the brcaft
Is William’s well, I know ;

Another prize and richer far
Than India could beftow.

She thus his favoured lock prefers
To make her William shine;

The ornament indeed is hers,

But all the nonour mine.”

Such language might well have kindled hope in the
mo^ discreet of women—and Lady Auften was very
far from being that. Her charafter had not changed,
any more than Cowper’s. She was ftill susceptible,
ilill uncontrolled, and ilill peculiarly open to Gjwper’s
kind of charm. The long winter of 1783, when she
spent whole days indoors, with nothing to diilraft
her from thinking about Cowper, was enough to revive
the ^ill-glowing embers of her passion. By the New
Year Cowper was beginning to feel the atmosphere
uncomfortably hot. Apart from anything else, her
interest in him was so inconvenient from the praftical
point of view. He could only work in the morning;
but in the morning she liked him to come and see her.
Now that he was fairly Parted on a long piece of work,
he wanted to give up these visits; but she was dread¬
fully wounded if he even suggested not coming. The
situation was getting very difficult; he would soon be
compelled to bring matters to a crisis. Before he could
force himself to the fearful task, however, he was
foreAalled by someone else. No man in the world
can live permanently in the same house with two ^rong-
willed women, both violently in love with him. Indeed,
only a man of supreme ta£I and dexterity in personal

203 9 f Cowper'

matters could have done it as long as Cowper did.
Mary had submitted to Lady Auften’s presence as
long as she felt it held no danger for her ; for she was
glad of anything that amused Cowper. But in time she
did begin to suspeft danger, and then the very same
qualities that made her Cowper’s slave in mo^l matters
made her his mafter in this. Her love was intense,
self-sacrificing and exclusive. She would die for him,
but she would never share him. When she thought
there was a possibility that she might have to, she took
action at once. What adhially happened we do not
know; but in the spring of 1784 it was made clear to
Cowper that he muSt choose between Mary and Anna,
and also that he mu^l choose Mary. Not, indeed, that
he would have hesitated to do so. Constancy, gratitude,
the claims of old friendship, these had always been far
and away the itvongeSt motive powers in his life. And
to Mary he was bound by every tie that gratitude and
affeftion could form. Had she not seen him through
the brief, Grange summer and bitter winter of his
days ? Was it not by her help that he had lived to see
the sun shine once more ? She had dedicated her life
to him; for him she had risked the sacrifice of her
small fortune and her good name. If he were to spend
the reft of his life in her service he would hardly
recompense her for what she had done for him. Anna,
on the other hand—ravishing creature though she
might be—had only known him for two years, and he
was not bound to her by any bond of gratitude. From
the point of view of the higheft principle, there was no
queftion what he ought to do. And anyway, with all
her charms, Anna could be very tiresome. He made
his decision quickly. Sitting down once more at his
table, once more he wrote her a letter.

Of all the pages torn by an lundiscriminating fate
from the records of Cowper's life this letter is the moft
tantalizing. He was very proud of it himself. He

The Stricken Deer 204

said that it made it unmiftakably clear that they
muft separate; but that it did so in a tone both
“ tender and resolute.*’ Lady Auften herself, in later
years, admitted that it was an admirable letter. Not
at the time, however. Yet once more her haily
passion blazed up: she threw the letter into the grate;
and within a few days had left for Briftol. In a flurry
of duSt her coach rattled away out of Olney, and out of
this history. For it was the end. This time there
was no reconciliation. Within the next five years she
came twice to ^ay at Clifton; but she never saw, or
spoke or wrote to Cowper again. A few years later
sne married a Monsieur de Tardiff, and went to live in
France. Did her love for Cowper linger for long after
they parted ? Did she ever, amid the hard glitter of
Napoleonic Paris and the lawful embraces of Monsieur
de Tardiff, caft a willful eye back to her brief Arcadian
yearnings, and the peaceful evenings of Olney ? So
the historian wonders and conjectures; and is ignorant.
Lady Auden’s exit from the ftage of Cowper’s life on
that May morning was as abrupt and complete as had
been her entrance.

Cowper did not wa^le time in fruitless regret. For
all their similarity of tafte, for all her exquisite sym¬
pathy with his moods, at the bottom of his heart he had
never \o£t the feeling that she was diflFerent from him,
a brilliant, exotic bird of paradise who had alighted, by
chance, in his quiet country garden. It had been
pleasant for a few dazzling moments to watch her
preen her feathers and flutter her wings; but he had
always known that in the end she would fly away. So
that when she aClually did so, he remained cheerful.
Her departure was a pity, but it was to be expeCled.
Lady AuClen, had she seen him, would certainly have
upbraided him for heartlessness. But in reality she
had no cause to repine. She had afFeCled his life
profoundly. And it is the measure of this efFeft that he

205 9f

could face life with much equanimity when she was gone.
Four years ago such a loss would have depressed him,
however certainly he had expected it; for his spirits
then were too weak to ftand the loss of any support.
But his connexion with her had increased his power of
resistance ten times over. Apart from anything else,
the faft of having two delightful women in love with
him muSl have added to his self-confidence. And the
complications arising out of their rivalry, tiresome
though they might seem at the time, diverted his mind
from morbidly brooding on itself. But Lady AuSten
had exercised a more direft and individual influence
on his recovery. Her mere presence revived his
interest in life: she was so flamingly excited about
everything that happened that anyone who was with
her could not help catching fire too. The books
Cowper read, the subje( 5 ts he talked about, the poems
he wrote, all seemed more absorbing when she was
there. It was on his work, above all, that her influence
was so important. Cowper had always worked better
under direction. He was hard-working and enthusi¬
astic once he had got something to do; but timid and
unenterprising about getting it. Lady AuSten’s sym¬
pathetic imagination supplied him with subjefts : her
confidence in his powers gave him the impetus to take
them up. Before she came, the locomotive of his
genius had never properly Started : by .the time she had
left it was running at full speed ; and Cowper was too
occupied in guiding its course to vouchsafe her more
than a passing glance of farewell.

There was nothing now to diStradt him from his
work. He was able to spend a large part of every day
in writing. He had found a refuge even more secluded
than the greenhouse : a summer-house at the extreme
end of the garden. It was an extraordinary little
eredtion of lath and plaSler and red tiles; as Cowper
truly said, juSl like a Sedan chair, with barely room in it

The Stricken Deer

206

for himself and a table. On one side, the door opened
on to the roses and honeysuckle of the garden; on the
other, he could gaze through a window at the grey-
lichened trunks of the fruit trees in a neighbouring
orchard. Cowper loved- the summer-house. “ k is
a place in which I fabricate all my verse in summer¬
time,” he wrote. “ The grass under my window is all
bespangled with dewdrops, and the birds are singing in
the apple trees, among tne blossoms. Never poet had
more commodious oratory in which to invoke his muse.”

However, summer came to an end, and he had to
write indoors. But ilill he worked on through murky
morning and candle-lit evening, and ftill, as he worked,
his spirits steadily rose; ftill, the return of nervous
health, begun so hartingly fifteen years before, got
fa^er and more irresiftible. By May 1785, when
” The Task ” was juft at the point of completion, it
achieved such a speed and momentum as never before.
Hard work had proved the very beft thing for him.
One of the ftrongeft forces againft Cowper’s recovery
had been his fataliftic submission to evil; and this had
been encouraged by his habit of life. For years his
whole exiftence had perforce been one of inert and idle
submission to circumftances. But during the laft
fifteen months he had been working; and working not
juft to pass the time, but to achieve a desired objeft.
This could not fail to put him in a more aftive frame of
mind, to make aftion, rather than submission his firft
involuntary response to events; and the aftion that
inevitably presented itself to him was ftruggle againft
his nervous enemies. Besides, he could embark on his
ftruggle with more hope of success than of old. No
one can bring a long, ambitious work to a successful
conclusion without gaining confidence in his own
powers. And over and above all this the sheer excite¬
ment of creation had keyed up his spirits to a pitch at
which they could not but be hopeful.

207 Life oj Cowper

The black pit of his fears shrank to the size of a pin¬
point. He could not underhand it, ilill less could he
account for it, but he felt more cheerful every day.
Unexplained, unexpected movements of delight began
to Stir in his consciousness, and for the firSt time there
^ole into his heart the thought that all his fears might
come to an end, that he might be saved. On he
worked: ever tenser grew his emotional excitement.
And then, aClually, the incredible happened. He
woke up one morning in May 1785 to find that the
burden of fear which had been the central faft of his
exigence for thirteen years had rolled away. He felt
he could believe what Mary and Newton had always
said. God loved him, as He loved other created beings ;
and, all being well, He would save him in the end. He
felt no dazzling eeftasy as in 1763: the sky was not
yet clear of clouds. But that grey pall, now dark,
now faint, which since his illnesa had overcail every
inch of its surface, was rent apart at hSt. And he saw
the sun.

For three dream-like days, days ever to be remem¬
bered, the mood la^ed. And then once more the
clouds covered the sky. Fads fell back into their
former proportion ; the old fears resumed their power;
the old convictions recovered their force. The truth
is, that if the mind runs on one line of thought over a
number of years, it makes a sort of rut for itself; and
though it may be lifted out of that rut by a violent
emotional excitement, after this excitement passes it
tends to fall back into it. Cowper’s mind had, as
we have seen, been dominated by his conviClion of
damnation ever since 1775. The organization both
of his outward and his inward existence, his interests,
his occupation, his general habit of mind, had grown up
in the light of this conviCf ion ; and except when he was
swept away by a great gush of creative encr^, it was
very difficult to live according to the forms ot such an

The Stricken Deer

208

exigence without unconsciously accepting the views
on which it was based. Reason, no doubt, should have
told him that if he had been able to rejeft these views
for three days, he should be able to rejeft them always.
Nothing had happened at the end of three days to make
them more probable. But reason, as usual, weighed
little with him ; for his belief was the result, not of a
logical process, but of disease. After all, his nerves
had been so injured, it had been so long before they
had even begun to mend, that the process of their
recovery was necessarily irregular. He might have
moments of relief, but at firft he mu^t expeft a relapse
to follow them.

Such a relapse was disappointing, “ The heavens,*’
he said, “ only opened to shut again.” But, oddly
enough, he did not feel deeply discouraged. Perhaps
in his heart of hearts he had never expelled happiness
to la^l. Anyway, any other feeling was far outweighed
by his pleasure in the realization that he could even
for a moment be hopeful. He had taken his damna¬
tion for granted so long that any more sanguine mood,
however short-lived, was a bright sign. He wondered
if happiness might not come again, and come to ftay.
Certainly, his general condition of mind continued to
improve ; even if he did not feel as he had during the
three days, he felt better than he had before them. It
is true that he Siill became irritable if anyone suggested
that he was better: indeed, his spirits StiW went
through dark periods. But they were grey rather than
black. And his mind was far too absorbed by his
work to succumb to their influence, as he had been used
to do. Whatever his conviftion about his damnation,
he thought about it less, and about other things more.
In every way he was more normal.

He was so much more independent than he used to
be. “ The Task ” was finished by October 1787, and
he had to arrange for its publication. Newton had been

209 Life of Cowper

his intermediary with his publisher for the firft book;
but for some reason Cowper now thought that he would
prefer to do it through Unwin; and he did not even tell
Newton he had written a book until it was juft coming
out. Newton was extremely hurt. He had never
been able to bear the thought that Cowper was escaping
from his influence, and this seemed to point unmiftak-
ably to'the faft that he was. He wrote to him in that
tone of Chriftian forbearance which is only employed
by those seriously out of temper, and demanded
an explanation. Ten years before such a letter would
have shaken Cowper to the earth. That he, the
despised and rejefted of God and man, should have so
provoked one of the paladins of the celeftial army,
would have been intolerable even to think of. How¬
ever, now he only wrote back a calm note, giving his
reasons for his aftion, but offering no apology. New¬
ton replied, less Chriftian and more censorious. And
now it was Cowper’s turn to lose his temper. Really,
Newton was too interfering. He had half a mind to
tell him frankly what he thought of him. On second
thoughts he refrained. But he did not give way ; and
in the end it was Newton who made the firft overtures
for peace. Cowper in an attitude of dignified defiance
is a comic thougnt. Still, the faft that he should be
able to take one up was a healthy sign.

His old intereft in the classics, too, had returned—
returned after an absence of twenty years. In the days
of his conversion he had looked upon them as pagan
vanities; and since then, except for an occasional
glance at an old Virgil, he had never had the heart to
take them up again. Now he wrote off to Unwin to
ask him to send him a Homer. He enjoyed reading it
enormously. But he did not merely read it. He was
at a loose end after “ The Task was finished; and,
as always, when he had nothing to do his spirits began
to sink. Suddenly he remembered Lady Auften’s

p

The Stricken Deer

210

suggeftion that he should translate Homer. He took
up the Iliad^ and Parted on one book as an experiment.
It was so successful that he went on. For the reft of
the winter he was completely absorbed in this work.
For the second time Anna had saved him from a bad
winter. Poor Anna! Let us hope that Cowper had
the grace to miss her a little !

Perhaps he did not, though. Already new friends
had sprung up to take her place. One evening
when he was sitting in his room, a Mr. Bagot was
announced to see him. It turned out to be a Bagot
who had been a friend of his at Weft^ninfter. There
had been several brothers, and one was now a bishop ;
one of the very few bishops, as it happened, of whom
Cowper conscientiously could approve. His caller,
William Bagot, had become a clergyman too. Cowper
was delighted to see him. He loved to recall with
tenderness the happy days of the paft, and he liked a
friend ten times better if he had known him a long time.
Besides, Mr. Bagot was a scholar. There was no one
in Olney with whom Cowper could discuss the niceties
of Homeric scholarship, and he now poured forth a
flood of opinions and queftions. Bagot did not live
in the neighbourhood; he had merely been ftaying
with one of his brothers, who did. But the connexion
was not allowed to drop when he went away. When¬
ever he visited his brother he used to come over to see
Cowper; and between whiles they corresponded about
Homer.

Cowper had also got to know the Throckmortons,
the owners of Wefton Park. The present owner was
not the same as he who had originally given Cowper
the key of Wefton Wilderness. He had died lately,
and had been succeeded by his son, John. To him
Cowper wrote, asking if he ftill might keep the
Wilderness key. And he received an answer which not
only granted his requeft, but invited him and Mrs.

21 I

Lije of Cowper

Unwin to come and see a balloon sent up in the park
a few days later. In spite of Cowper’s doubts as to the
morality of ballooning, he accepted the invitation.
The balloon, however, failed to go up; but Cowper
and Mary enjoyed themselves as much as if it had.
Both Mr. Throckmorton and his wife were very kind.
Singling them out from all their other guests, they led
them into the house to drink chocolate, asked them to
use the garden as well as the park to walk in, and
repeated over and over again their wish to see more of
them. Cowper liked the idea. He thought both Mr.
and Mrs. Throckmorton charming. It was true that
they were Roman Catholics, born of the breed of that
Scarlet Woman who preached that works were worth
as much as faith. But it is the measure of how much
Cowper’s Evangelicalism had modified that this faft,
which twenty years ago would have made him shudder,
now made no difference to him at all.

All the same, he felt shy. After all, the Throck-
mortons lived in such very grand ftyle. It would be
pleasant to go and see them once in a while; but any¬
thing like a common social life seemed impossible.
So, though he was cordial, he made no decided move¬
ment towards cultivating a friendship with them.
Mr. Throckmorton was also shy; and for a year or two
the acquaintance remained at a ftandilill. In the
summer of 1785, however, for one reason and another,
they met more often than usual. And now Cowper
was in a much more aftive condition of mind—willing,
nay anxious, to follow up the acquaintance.

These new additions to his lift of friends did their

f )art in accelerating his recovery. He was living more
ike an ordinary man than before, and he became more
like an ordinary man. And now an important event
happened. “ The Task ” came out. It was a quiet
time in the literary world, and it had a huge and
immediate success. At one swoop Cowper soared to

The Stricken Deer

212

the top of the tree of contemporary poetry. Preachers,
politicians, literary pundits united to praise him. Olney
became a famous place, the summer-house and the
greenhouse celebrated objefts. Mrs. Throckmorton
brought over a party of fashionable ladies down from
London to see them. Cowper feared they would be
very disappointed when they did. Things seem much
more attractive when described in poetry than they
are in reality. But he showed them everything, with
gratified care, made them each a neat bunch of myrtle,
and took the opportunity to repay a small part of Mrs.
Throckmorton’s hospitality by giving her some cuttings
of a special kind of canary lavender for her own garden.

Nor was she the only one of his friends to congratu¬
late him. One morning he was excited to receive
a letter in a familiar hand. He tore it open, to be
faced with the demonstrative, opinionated, entertaining,
helter-skelter Style, the heavily underlined writing of
Harriet Hesketh. She had read his poems; she thought
them perfectly delightful; she had felt she muSt get into
communication with him again. Cowper was overjoyed.
If Bagot’s visit had unsealed the fountains of tender
recollection, how much more did this 1 Harriet was
associated with some of the pleasanteSt days of his life.
The drawing-room of Southampton Row; the walks
to Ranelagh; that summer in Dorsetshire—all the
forgotten beloved scenes of the paSt crowded in a
glowing haze of memory before his mind’s eye. He
hurried from the table and wrote off an enthusiaftic
letter of thanks. Harriet was now a widow, com¬
fortably living in London, with nothing much to do,
and she talked of Cowper and his poems to all her
friends. Soon her letter was followed by others, from
other members of Cowper’s family.

And the letters were followed by gifts. A silver
snuff-box and several bottles of Madeira from Harriet,
and a beautiful desk, inlaid with ivory and silver, from

213 Cowper

an anonymous donor. Harriet asked him about his
financial position. He admitted he was pinched. She
wrote round to her relations, and soon his income was
increased by a hundred a year.

This was very pleasant: he had disliked feeling
that he was indebted to Mary. But his renewed
friendship with Lady Hesketh was Still pleasanter. It
engaged his attention as no personal relationship had
done since his fir^l meeting with Lady Auften five years
before: he neglefted all his other correspondence in
order to write to her. She took as intense an interest in
him as he did in her. When he sent her a chicken as
a present she was in an agony leil such a present might
have involved a sacrifice on his part. He reassured her.
And with growing enthusiasm and more and more
adje£lives and exclamations and endearments, the corre¬
spondence continued.

At hSiy Lady Hesketh suggested coming to ilay, in
June. Cowper’s excitement knew no bounds. His
letters became lyrical with joy. “ I have nothing to
do but wish for June ; and June, my cousin, was never
so wished for since June was made. I shall have a
thousand things to hear, and a thousand things to say,
and they will all rush into my mind together, till it will
be so crowded with things impatient to be said that for
some time I shall say nothing. . . . After so long a
separation, a separation that of late years seemed likely
to last for life, we shall meet each other as alive from the
dead.'' And again, “ I shall see you again. I shall
hear your voice. We shall take walks together . . .
you shall sit with a bed of mignonette at your side and
a hedge of honeysuckle, roses and jasmine ; and I will
make you a bouquet of myrtle every day."

But as the time of her visit drew near, one difficulty
after another sprang up to prevent it. Firil, there was
the queftion of the house. She refused to come to
Orchard Side, as she wanted to spare Cowper's income;

The Stricken Deer 214

but it was, difficult to find lodgings with enough rooms
for the three servants without whom Lady Hesketh
could not think of travelling. The linen-crapcr had
rooms to let, with a charming sitting-room, but they
contained no bedroom for Lady Hesketh’s woman.
A lace buyer near the church had good bedrooms, but
no sitting-room for the cook and footman. The
Vicarage alone was big enough to hold her retinue
comfortably, but it was completely unfurnished.
However, after a little discussion a Quaker of the
neighbourhood offered to supply furniture for five
months for the very moderate sum of five guineas,
including two large armchairs and a “ superb bed
adorned with a bedspread of linen with a picture of
Phaeton kneeling before Apollo printed on it. The
little household at Orchard ISide gave itself up to busy,
delighted, excited preparation for the coming visit.
Mary began fattening up her chickens, Cowper got
ready a fine passion tree m a tub to fill up the unused
fireplace of the Vicarage parlour. The weeks passed,
and then, only, a fortnight before she should arrive.
Lady Hesketh wrote to say that her coach was broken
down and she mu^ wait for it to be mended. Cowper
nearly buril into tears. For the whole day he sulked
and complained, deaf to Mary’s consolations. It was
the lait delays however. The coach was soon put right;
Lady Hesketh wrote a lail letter imploring them to
make no grand preparations to entertain her; and on
the 20th June, 1786, amid peals of bells from the
church tower, she drove into Olney.

As might have been expefted, when he knew she was
actually on the road Cowper had been seized with a fit
of nerves. He was so excited at the thought of meet¬
ing her that he wondered if it might not prove too much
for him. A thousand fears began to Stir in his troubled
brain. Even if it did not make him ill, the meeting
might prove a disappointment. He had acquired few

215 Copper

ladling conviftions in his melancholy fifty-four years
of life; but one of them was that anticipated joys
generally proved disappointments. When she arrived
it seemed for a moment as if it was going to be juifified.
A cloud descended on him, and during the whole
afternoon he sat, glum and ftiff, his eyes fixed on the
ground, barely opening his mouth. For once, how¬
ever, his fears were not realized. Within a few hours
he had got his spirits back. Lady Hesketh was ju^l
the same as she used to be, juft as lively and warm¬
hearted and managing and enthusiaftic and respeftable,
juft as full of jokes and advice and demonftrations of
affedlion and orthodox opinions. Even her brilliant
complexion had not altered. Her presence made a lot
of difference to Cowper. It was not the same sort of
difference as Lady Auften had made. In his relation
with Lady Hesketh there was no hint of romance.
She was his cousin, and he felt for her that comfortable,
friendly regard, founded on a common origin, cemented
by common memories, that one feels for a relation.
They underftood each other by inftinft. They had
the same prejudices, the same conventions, the same
jokes. Lady Hesketh was always throwing Cowper into
fits of laughter, especially when she told him “ the
ftory about the Glouceftershire Attorneys,*’ He saw a
great deal of her. Unlike Lady Auften, again, she
did not interfere with his work. During the morning
he was left completely alone, but the afternoon they
spent together, walking, or driving in her carriage.
If they walked, Lady Hesketh used to carry a velvet
bag full of pennies with her and scatter them to the
village children—a homely charity, after Cowper’s own
heart. They dined together and spent the reft of the
day in each other’s company. If it was fine, they sat
in the garden, if wet, indoors, “ comfortably round
one dining-table, without ftirring, till after supper,”
says Lady Hesketh. “ Our friend delights in a large

2i6

The Stricken Deer

table and a large chair. There are two of the latter
comforts in my parlour. I am sorry to say that he and
I always spread ourselves out in them, leaving poor
Mrs. Unwin to find all the comfort she can in a small
one, half as high again as ours, and considerably
harder than marble. However, she protects it is what
she likes; but I hope she is sincere. Her constant
employment is knitting blockings. . . . Our cousin
has not, for many years, worn any other than those of
her manufacture. She sits, knitting, on one side of
the table, in her speClacles, and he on the other, reading
to her, in his.” Lady Hesketh used to listen while he
read aloud. If he wrote, she copied out the manuscript
of his translation.

But she did not merely enhance his life as it was.
Her practical, feminine nature, anxious to do good to
her fellows, and sure she knew how to do it, thought
Cowper needed society. His nervous attacks were,
to her common-sense eye, due to his abnormally
solitarv life with these queer, religious people. So,
day after day, the wheels of her chariot rolled out of
Olney, bearing her and Cowper and Mary to pay a visit
at We^on or Gayhurft.

Cowper was very well able to make himself agree¬
able, and he enjoyed these visits. Mary, too, strongly
approved of these excursions. Her patient, loving
observation had long ago told her that Cowper was the
better for variety. Was it not this knowledge that had
made her put up with Lady Auften for so long }
When it came through Lady Hesketh, she welcomed
it. It was a'great comfort that she liked Lady Hesketh
so much. From the fir^l she had been pleased by the
tone of her letters. “ Please tell Lady Hesketh that I
truly respeCl and love her,” she had said to Cowper.
Lady Hesketh sent her a silver snuff-box. When
they met the favourable impression produced on both
sides by these amenities had been confirmed. After

217 Lije of Cowper

all, Mary had no reason to be jealous of Lady Hesketh.
William Unwin liked her too. He had paid a formal
call on her in order to form his own impressions, as he
had before on Lady Auilen ; and, as before, he had been
dubious. Lady Hesketh’s complexion was so very
brilliant for a woman of her age. Could it be real ?
Cowper earneftly assured him that it was. He had
seen it come and go. William came to ftay during
Lady Hesketh’s visit, and was completely won over
to her. Never indeed had four people got on so
famously. Now we want Mr. Unwin,'' said Lady
Hesketh, the day after he left. Her reason for
saying so," quoted Cowper to Unwin, “ was that we
had spent nearly half an hour together without laugh¬
ing, an interval of gravity that does not often occur
when you are present."

One of Cowper's friends, however, was not so
pleased at the new developments in his life. Since the
disagreement over the publication of " The Task,"
Newton had watched Cowper’s career with growing
suspicion. He had been disagreeably surprised to
learn that Cowper was spending his time in translating
the writings of the heathen. Cowper, fearful that he
might not like it, had made as little of it as he could,
merely referring in a casual way to the fafl: that, by way
of passing the winter days, he was making an English
version of the old Asiatic tale of Homer. Newton
felt not altogether satisfied. He said to a friend that
in the days of his conversion Cowper would no more
have thought of doing such a thing than of putting
the tale of " Jack the Giantkiller ” into Greek. Nor
were the Throckmortons, a Roman Catholic family of
social habits, the friends he would have expefted or
approved for a sincere Evangelical. In 1786 he began
asking questions about them. Cowper assured him
that they were charming people and that he was certain
the acquaintance was blessed by Providence. For a

The Stricken Deer

218

second time Newton felt not altogether satisfied. And
now, as the summer advanced, what should he hear
but that Cowper was off every afternoon on some party
of pleasure m the Babylon of Bedfordshire County
society. He wrote off hurriedly, demanding an im¬
mediate explanation. Cowper was not so concerned to
please the susceptibilities of Newton as of old. He
told him what he had done, and defied him to see any
harm in it. Actually, as he was careful to point out,
his conviftion of his own damnation had not altered.
Newton need not worry. He was ^lill fundamentally
miserable, and Mrs. Unwin ^lill spent hours praying
for him. This was reassuring news; but Newton’s
fears were not really removed. He had heard for a
fail that Cowper had been seen in a green coat and had
even taken part in an archery competition. In face
of such fa£Is no amount of plausible explanation could
set his mind at re^.

Cowper might say he was miserable, but, in faft,
his recovery progressed daily. It was not only what
Lady Hesketh did which raised his spirits. It was
the fail that she did it She returned to Cowper’s
life, a figure from his dead youth, that blissful period
before he had gone mad ; and in her company he un¬
consciously tended to fall back into the habit of mind
of those days. Old jokes, old names, were ever on
his lips, and old thoughts began to creep back into
his mind. Harriet, especially, had been a cheering
influence, even in the paft. Was it not she who had
brought him back to happiness at Southampton ?
And in her company his outlook fteadily brightened.
It had brightened before, but now for the firft time
improvement of spirits began to show itself in outward
form. He spoke of himself in his letters, except those
to Newton, not as one surely damned, but as one who,
though not yet admitted to salvation, cherished a
con^ant hope that one day he would be. In response

219 Lije oj Cowper

to Lady Hesketh's rcqucft, he even began to say grace
at table.

Shortly before she came, Mr. Throckmorton had
told Cowper that Wefton Lodge, a house of his in the
village, had fallen vacant, and he wondered if Cowper
would like to take it. For himself he had rejefted the
idea as too revolutionary, but he told Lady Hesketh
about it in case she might like to take it herself. In
her turn, she rejefted the proposal. But she took up
the idea of Cowper living there with passion. She
thought that his depression arose in great part from
his living at Olney in a gloomy little house, associated
with, and inseparable in his mind from some of the
gloomieft experiences of his life. If he could live
somewhere else, and somewhere like We^lon, where he
would be near pleasant and only mildly religious
friends, she thought it probable that his morbidities
would vanish away. It remained to be seen, however,
if the house was a suitable one. One afternoon they
all drove over to see it. Even in its vacant ftate it
compared very favourably with Orchard Side. It was
certainly a moSt incongruous setting for spiritual
disorder, a neat, square, sunny house, in a style at once
unpretentious and well-bred, with window-seats and low
white panelled rooms and a shallow, charming staircase.
And its situation was in keeping with its appearance.
The front, unlike that of Orchard Side, looked forth
over the open fields, and the back on to its own walled
garden that rambled up the hill, half useful, half
ornamental, with currant bushes and damask roses
mixed till it was bounded by the tree-tops of We^on
Park. So that it was quiet. But it was not lonely.
If one walked a few yards down the road on one side,
one came to the classic gates of Wefton Park, and on
the other to the draggling end of the village of Wefton,
with its thatched cottages and gardens gay with
hollyhocks: the pcrfcdl English village of idyllic

The Stricken Deer

220

imagination, where red-coated huntsmen jingle gal¬
lantly to the Meet on a soft autumn morning, or, on a
glowing evening in summer the cumbrous hay-carts
creak home with sun-bonneted children perched atop.

Lady Hesketh was determined Cowper should have
the house. And though he could not have made up
his mind on such a change by himself, he was really
very glad when she made it up for him. There was a
little difficulty finding the money. But Lady Hesketh
helped them: and early in Oftober they moved.
When the aftual moment for going arrived, Cowper
minded as much as he had always minded a change.
He had lived at Olney for nineteen years, and he was
bound to it by the tentacles of a thousand memories.
There, in the distant days of his conversion, he had
joyfully prayed and praised ; there his second madness
had fallen on him; he had recovered there; there
played with his hares and written his firil book; there
met and laughed and quarrelled with Anna; there
known his firft belated ta^fe of fame. Many of these
recolleftions were sad, but he felt as much bound to
the place by sad as by happy recolleftions. Change is
painful to man because it puts him in mind of his
mortality, “ This,” he tells himself, “ was once the
present and now it is vanished ; and so will vanish
everything else,” His sorrows seem among the
deepeft and mo^l permanent things in his life; and
thus, their disappearance strikes him as proportionately
telling evidence of the frailty of things mortal. As he
drove away from the house, Cowper’s eyes were dazed
with tears. He happened to go into Orchard Side
again two months later. In the cold light of the
winter afternoon the placer hung from the ceiling and
the duSi blew up and down the floors. It seemed
impossible to believe that only a few weeks before here
had been the friendly, warm abode of human beings.
The sense of mortality swept over him once more, and

221

Ltje of Cowper

with a double force. His mind reverted to the theme
of its moft sombre meditations. “ Such and so dis¬
mal,” he said to himself, “ is the condition of a soul
deserted by God.”

However, his melancholy soon left him when he was
back at Wefton Lodge. It was so cheerful to do one’s
work in a newly-furnished room, looking south; much
more cheerful than in a dingy room looking north. Now
and again he would pause for a moment and look out of
the window, and his eye would light, not on a dull row
of houses, but on green foreground and blue distance.
Then his view would be blocked perhaps by the head
and shoulders of Mr. Throckmorton, turning in at the
gate to pay a morning call. Cowper’s life was full of
mild social events. He dined with the Throckmortons
several times a week, and in the afternoon Mrs.
Throckmorton would sometimes call, and her husband
or the chaplain used to meet him in his rambles in the
wilderness, now only a few easy ileps from the door.
There was no doubt the change was a success. “ I
think every day of those lines of Milton,” he writes,
“ when congratulating myself on having obtained,
before I am quite superannuated, what he seems not
to have hoped for sooner;

‘ . . . And may at length my weary age,

Find out a peaceful hermitage.’

For, if it is not a hermitage, it is a much better thing;
and you muft always underhand, my dear, that when
poets talk of cottages and hermitages, and such-like
things, they mean a house with six sashes in front, two
comfortable parlours, a smart staircase and three bed¬
chambers of comfortable dimensions—in short, such
a house as this.” Could it be that Harriet was right:
that his melancholy had been but a temporary illness,
from which he had now recovered ? And that such

The Stricken Deer

222

moments of depression as he had lately experienced
were fancies called up by the gloomy memories
associated with his old dwelling ? Could it be that
the ilorms and breaking seas of his life’s day were
behind him, and that now, as evening drew on, his
battered bark was to be permitted to rock to re^f,
softly in a sunlit harbour ?

CHAPTER V

THE FINAL DECLINE, I786-180O

Alas I Cowper’s hopes were vain. In the middle of
November news came to Weston that William Unwin
had been taken suddenly ill at Winche^er. A week
later he was dead. A lifetime of patient resignation
to evil, and the desire not to make things worse for
Mary, flopped Cowper from giving way to grief.
Bull, who rode over on a visit of condolence, was amazed
how calm he managed to appear. But in reality he
was suffering under a great shock. It was not only
that he had been especially fond of William. He had
come to the age when man can ill bear the loss of anyone
he cares for: for he feels it to be the sign and prologue
to his own dissolution. Besides, he cannot well spare
a friend when he is too old to make new ones and too
weak to live a life of solitary independence. The
circumftances of Unwin’s death, too, were particularly
painful to contemplate. He left a young wife and
two small children. “ I cannot think of it,” said Cowper,
“ without a heartache I do not remember to have felt
before.” A mood of lassitude and dejedlion took
possession of his spirits. He loil all pleasure in
society, would sit for hours at his table, unable to bring
himself to work at anything.

So passed December; and now January, fatal
January, was here. Sure enough, the old symptoms
began to reappear. His sleep was troubled by dreams,
his waking hours by accusing voices. In his present

223

The Stricken Deer 224

condition they were fatal to him. His shaken nerves
could mu^ler up no power of resistance. Every day
he grew rapidly worse. Melancholy swelled to obses¬
sion, obsession to delusion. Finally one terrible night
once more in dream he heard the voice of God
raised in wrath againSt him, “ I will promise you
anything,” it declared, and again, ” I will promise you
anything.” To Cowper this could only have one
meaning. It was the firm and final declaration of
Heaven that any hopes of salvation he had cherished
were vain, and any good God might seem to promise
him was not to be believed. The foundation of such
confidence as he Still possessed was swept away; and
the whole Structure of habit and security which he had
managed to ereft on the broken remnants of his old
life fell to the ground. For the third time in his life
Cowper was a raving maniac.

Six weeks had sufficed to deStroy the work of thirteen
years. At first sight it seems aStounding. But the
truth was his recovery had been more apparent than
real. The seat of his malady had never been touched ;
the infefted area had never been examined, much less
cleansed; he had never loft any of his delusions. Only
his intense vitality had enabled him to achieve a partial
return to mental health in spite of these handicaps.
Whatever his delusions, he managed to prevent them
dominating his thoughts. But he was like a man
breathing through one lung. And, like a man
breathing through one lung, he could only go on if he
was subjedled to no extra ftrain. In Unwin’s death
for the firft time he suftained a severe shock; and,
moft unluckily, at that very time of year when he was
always at his weakeft. The consequence was that he
immediately succumbed.

The disease followed its old course. Once again
he tried to kill himself. Once again he shrank from

225 Lije of Cowper

all other friends, and clung only to Mary, In one
respedl it was a worse attack than before, for it came
after a period of so much hope and he felt propor¬
tionately discouraged by it. On the other hand, this
time it lafted much less long than before. There was
no period of gradual recovery. One day in July he
returned to his right mind; and by September he was
working and writing letters and dining out, to outward
appearance juft the same as he had been before the
attack.

It was to outward appearance only. His inner man
had in that time undergone a change only less decisive
than his original conversion. He had completely and
finally loft his capacity for hope. Of course he had
despaired many times before : in the throes of madness
and when he felt madness coming over him. But now
he did so when his health and spirits were improving,
in cold blood, and with clear eyes, in the light of a
sort of perverted reason. Why should he hope } All
the methods to which he had trufted to defend him
againft the enemies of his spirit—religious, medical,
social—all in turn had failed him. He could not face
being disappointed again. He had better not hope.
Indeed, had he not received a specific warning not to
do so Of course God was omnipotent, and might
reverse His decision and save him. But why should
He } Everything went to show that his old con-
viftions were right. He was the single created soul
predeftined to fall from grace. What was God’s
purpose in so predeftining him he could not tell. The
only reason he could think of was that He did it to
demonftrate His omnipotence, even over His own
laws. Such a view would have been impossible to
anyone with a living devotional life. No one who ftill
felt God to be the principle of peace and love in their
own life could also have believed He could aft so
Q

The Stricken Deer

226

unju^ly. But it was far too long since Cowper had
experienced any spiritual happiness for this to move
him. He saw no reason, indeed, to doubt the truth
of the Calvini^lic doftrinal system. Only now, after
his third collapse, he could no longer conceal from
himself the fa£t that to his sinful eyes it did appear
inexplicably cruel and unjuft. Nor was it his own
sad hiftory alone that brought this home to him. All
Evangelical England was at this time ringing with the
horrors exposed by the firft anti-slavery agitation.
Cowper brooded on the fate of these thousands of
wretched heathen, created, as it seemed, only that they
might be tortured in this world and damned in the
next. His creed told him that it was all a part of the
beneficent plan of an infallible God ; but he could not
even begin to think how this could be so. If such
was the will of God, why should it be unlikely that He
should damn the soul of a single worthless sinner like
himself? No; reason and observation alike forbade
him to hope.

The ftrange thing was that, in spite of this, he was
not sunk in a black despondency. But though he had
loft all heavenly comfort, on earth he was not yet
comfortless. Mary’s devotion during his laft illness
had added another ftrand, if another ftrand was needed,
to the ftrong cord that bound Cowper to her; and
now that all hope of Divine succour had finally left
him, her figure loomed out, the single citadel of support
on his horizon. His relationship to her was far and
away the moft important thing m his life. It alone
ftirred a movement of happiness in his deeper feelings;
it alone promised not merely diftraftion from sorrow,
but was in some degree its antidote. Without Mary,
Cowper would have felt too weak to face life at all.
With her at his side, his lot could not be for long
wholly without alleviation.

227 ^ovbper

Nor had he loft his power of enjoyment. The
amazing vitality that had enabled him—shattered,
fragile creature as he was—to survive a third attack
of violent melancholy madness, ftill rose within him.
He found that he ftill responded to the world around
him with intereft, with delight. In a spirit of sad
philosophy, therefore, he abandoned himself to the
pleasures of the moment. This, too, was not a new
attitude for him. He had adopted it after his laft
attack; but, like his despair, it was for the firft time
the expression of deliberate and cold-blooded decision.
Even if he was going to go mad the next January, he
thought to himself, what was the advantage in worrying
about it in June

“ The present is a dream,” he said, “ but one wishes
to make it as pleasant as one can.”

Two things in particular made it pleasant. One was
his work. Translation was an ideal employment for
someone in his condition; for it gave him regular
occupation without making too severe a demand on
his creative energies. And he found it very soothing
for a large part of every day to exchange the society of
his own ftagnant thoughts for that of the aftive and
unintrospeftive warriors of Troy and Greece. He had
also recovered his enjoyment of the amusements and
incidents of ordinary life. There were more of th«m
at Wefton than at Olney. The world he lived in there
was less of a hermitage: it was more the ordinary
world of the English country gentry of the day; the
world depifted with so precise an irony by Jane Auften
—diftindt from fashionable London society on the
one hand, and more sharply from that of rich farmers
and families in trade on the other—a small world of
rigid conventions and easy labours and mild amuse¬
ments and regular habits, where ail the men were
clergymen or squires, and led much the same life

The Stricken Deer

228

whichever they were; and the women copied out
extracts and played the harp; a world whose serious
occupations were looking after the land and sitting
on the Bench and getting married, whose pleasures
were sport and cards for low stakes, and small talk all
the time, and now and again a ball. Cowper never
went so far as to attend a ball. When Mrs. Throck¬
morton gave one at Weilon Park he excused himself
as too old. But he joined her archery club, and wore
its green coat and buff waistcoat with ingenuous delight.
The Throckmortons were inevitably the centre of his
social life; Mr. Throckmorton placid and pirik-faced, his
wife sharp-featured and with lively eyes, as they live for
us in the elegant chalk of Downman to this day. There
was nothing about them of the scandal-mongering,
fox-hunting ladies and gentlemen that Cowper detected.
They were quiet and well-bred and cultivated. Cowper
could not contain his admiration when he saw the
drawings of the Pantheon Sir John had made in Rome
when he was there on the grand tour. And his
library, too, was a model of what a gentlemen’s should
be. He asked Cowper to use it as if it were his own.
There was, indeed, no end to the kindness of the
Throckmortons. All through the winter they sent
Cowper braces of partridges, and when Mrs. Throck¬
morton learned that he no longer had a greenhouse,
she. gave him complete control of hers. As for
invitations, they never flopped. Hardly two days
went by that one could not see Cowper and Mary
picking their way through the few yards of muddy lane
that separated them from the Park. The Throck¬
mortons were seldom alone. As Cowper sat down
at table his eyes would travel along a whole row of
faces; county neighbours over for the day or relations
laying in the house—brothers and aunts and red¬
cheeked children in sprig-muslin frocks or skeleton

229 Life oj Cowper

jackets, nephews or nieces, as the case might be.
Cowper enjoyed all this company: he felt he was
getting a glimpse, as from a secure window, at the
great gay world. Not that he was a mere speftator.
Now that he was a famous poet his every word was
received with respectful interest; and in the pleasant
warmth of this attention he blossomed into a raconteur.
CharaCleri^ically his Glories were generally againft
himself—the ludicrous figure he cut when he had been
pursued by a bull or torn his trousers in a public place.
He told them with an exquisite ze^t of appreciation.
Before the ftory was well begun, his gentle eyes had
begun to twinkle, his thin lips to expand in a smile;
and by the time the point was reached he was in a fit
of laughter so infeCfious that no one who heard him
could fail to laugh too. And he liked playing with
the children. One day they persuaded him to get
into a wheeled chair, and then whirled it at a break¬
neck and terrifying speed from one end of the house
to the other. Such are the penalties inevitably conse¬
quent on kindness to children.

His intercourse with the Throckmortons was not
confined to their house. Now and again Mary and
he muftered their resources, made careful preparation,
and had the family to dinner. And more often, if
her husband was away,. Mrs. Throckmorton would
come in and share their ordinary simple meal. She
had become a great friend. Cowper liked Mr. Throck¬
morton very much; but, as usual, it was the woman
in whose company he took moft pleasure. In almoft
every letter he writes at this time wc catch a glimpse
of her neat, vivacious figure—Mrs. Throckmorton
coming in for the afternoon to copy out his translation
for him; Mrs. Throckmorton coming back from
mushrooming, her sweeping skirts inches deep in
mud; Mrs. Throckmorton topping with some visitor

The Stricken Deer 230

at the garden gate. If Cowper saw her from the
window he wovud hurry out and bring the party in.
Ten years before an unexpedled Granger interrupting
him at work would have upset him for the day. Now
he ftood and talked unconcerned, even if he noticed a
visitor ifealing a glance at the sheets of manuscript,
the ink ^lill gleaming wet upon them, that littered the
writing-table. The Throckmortons were away two or
three months in the year; and then Cowper wrote long
letters to “ Mrs. Frog ” as he called her, giving the
news of village and garden and nursery, telling her
how he had had some children ^lill laying on at the
Park to tea, or how Mr. George Throckmorton’s
fiancee. Miss Stapleton, had come and played spillikins
with him. This Miss Stapleton became as close a
friend as Mrs. Throckmorton. She sang beautifully;
and this to Cowper, so sharply sensitive to aesthetic
pleasure, and as eve** so starved of it, shed an ideal light
over her figure. Some of the mo^I exquisite moments
of his life at this time were due to her. She sang his
own songs ; and as he sat in the quiet parlour listening
to the familiar words as they floated up on the sweet,
true voice, a thousand emotions of joy and regret and
tenderness stirred in his heart. One summer evening
after she had finished he walked out into the garden.
All around, the trees were loud with the song of the
nightingales. Miss Stapleton’s voice was ftill echoing
in his ears; it was as if the nightingales had taken
up the tale of her melody. For a time he likened
entranced, then, as the twilight gathered, he turned
homewards. He wrote a little poem about the
incident. His friendship with the Throckmortons
was always inspiring him to occasional poetry. He
con^ituted himself as a sort of poet laureate to the
family—composed epitaphs for their dogs, Fop and
Neptune, to oe carved on urns in the Wimerness, and

231 Lije of Cowper

wrote verses congratulating Mrs. Throckmorton on
her beautiful handwriting, or lamenting the death of
her bullfinch.

The Throckmortons were his greate^l friends; but
they did not make up the limit of his acquaintance.
We find him at eight o’clock in the morning uncom¬
fortably arrayed in all the ftiffness of full dress and
wig, to drive over and spend a day with Bagot’s
brother at Chichely. And he was always walking
over to Olney to see his old friends, Wilson the barber,
or Palmer the draper. Prone on Palmer’s counter
he would lie, watching the customers and gossiping.
He had made a new friend in Olney, too—the vicar,
Mr. Bean. He liked him so well that he even agreed
to contemplate a religious subjeft long enough to
Write a hymn for the Sunday School. Perhaps he
felt that any thoughts suitable-for innocent children
would be unlikely to remind him of the spiritual
condition of a hardened sinner like himself. The
hymn shows his views to have been ftill uncom¬
promisingly Evangelical:

“ Hear, Lord, the song of praise and prajer
From Heaven, Thy dwelling-place,

From infants made the public care
And taught to seek Thy Face.

Thanks for Thy Word and for this day,

And grant us, we implore,

Never to wafte in sinful play
Thy holy Sabbaths more.”

We muft hope Mr. Bean was satisfied. It can
hardly be imagined that the children entered with
much heart into these bleak aspirations.

People used to come and see Cowper too, Bagot and
Bull, and Mr. Greatheed, the minister of Newport
Pagnell, bowling over in his high-wheeled phaeton;
and one day young Lord Ferrers rode over with his

The Stricken Deer 232

tutor, and had the condescension to partake of a dish
of chocolate. Old friends used to come and ^tay
for several days—Newton, the Powleys, Harriet Hes-
keth. With Newton, Cowper, to outward appear¬
ance, was on as intimate terms as ever. But it was
only to appearance. Newton was on the look-out
for the leaft sign of backsliding. He was extremely
digressed when Cowper told him he was writing some
verses in response to a request from a lady on a pen
which she had found on the Prince of Wales’s writing-
table. The very name of so famous and so flourishing
a sinner filled Newton’s mind with suspicion: could
it be that Cowper was going to mention it in terms
of compliment Cowper assured him that, on the
contrary, “ there was no character in Europe he held
in greater abomination.” But Newton was not
satisfied.

The truth was that Cowper had touched that weak
spot in his charafter that all his self-discipline had not
enabled him to remove, his desire to dominate. Because
he could no longer dominate Cowper, he no longer
trusted him, and any alteration in his mode of life
he took as ju^ifying his mi^truil. Sometimes, as he
compared the wild whirl of carriage drives and village
tea-parties in which Cowper now lived with the
missionary meetings and spiritual exercises of twenty
years before, he even wondered if Cowper was not
right about his soul—that he really had fallen from
grace. Chriilian charity bade him hope not. The
claims of old affection prevented him breaking with
him. But holding such views, it was not to be
expefted that their intercourse was any longer much
pleasure to either. For a long time they had been
receding from each other: now a gulf had opened out
between them, and although they might clasp hands
over it, neither of them was ever to cross it again.

233 Cowper

Any failure on the part of Newton was more than
compensated for by Harriet Hesketh. Her friend¬
ship was an even greater source of pleasure to him
than that of the Throckmortons. He looked forward
to her letters, and ^lill more to her visits, with passion ;
and if either of them was delayed fell into a fever of
anxiety. It certainly was a different place when she
was there. Her bulling, caressing presence seemed
to brighten any room she came into. Cowper basked
in its glow. The mo^l humdrum occupations, like
unpacking a parcel, were delightful when Harriet
sat on the ftairs, her voluminous skirts spread around
her, and watched and commented. Even to be
interrupted by her was a pleasure.

“ Should you find many blots and my writing
illegible you mu^t pardon me in consideration of the
cause. Lady Hesketh and Mrs. Unwin are both
talking as if they designed to make themselves amends
for the silence they are enjoined to keep when I sit
translating Homer. Mrs. Unwin is preparing the
breakfast, and not having seen each other since they
parted to go to bed, they have consequently a deal to
communicate.”

She usually came in the winter, and it made a
valuable difference to his spirits at that trying time of
year. She called him Giles Gingerbread and Jeremy
Jago, as she used to do in Southampton Row forty
years before. With the youthful nicknames some of
the light-hearted confidence of youth came back to
him.

Harriet’s kindness was not confined to visiting him.
As its only link with London, she undertook a thousand
commissions for the household at We^lon, ranging
from canvassing subscribers for Homer to buying
“ a pound of green wax for a spindle.” While as
for her presents, Cowper’s thanks could not keep pace

The Stricken Deer 234

with them. She praftically furnished the house, as
well as helping to pay for it. As Cowper’s eye ranged
routed the pleasant walls of his ^ludy, from carpet to
bookshelf, from looking-glass to brass-budded arm¬
chair, it lighted on nothing that was not a present from
Harriet. The very cap he wore for working in the
morning—that brange turban-like cap—was from her;
and she used to brighten his simple meals by sending
him claret and Madeira. He had a capacity for
attrabing presents. A serious-minded lady, Mrs.
King, in the neighbouring village of Pertenhall, read
his poetry and then scraped an acquaintance with him
on the grounds that she had known his brother.
Cowper added her gladly to his lib of correspondents.
In return she sent him cake and apples and a brilliant
counterpane of her own making.

She was not alone in wanting to know him. By an
ironical caprice of fortune, Cowper, who had spent
a considerable part of his life in search of retirement,
who had found the humdrum narrowness of middle-
class London insufficiently obscure for his desires,
at the age of sixty, unintentionally, had become a
public figure, one of that minute band who, in each
generation, manage to make their personalities felt
outside their immediate surroundings, to be liked and
discussed and disliked by people who have never seen
them. To pass the time, he had written some verses,
and it had happened. Hurdis the poet wrote to him
for advice; Romney wanted to paint him; the
Dowager l^dy Spencer, mother of the magnificent
Duchess of Devonshire, asked to be allowed to call
on him. Fox himself could spve a moment from
the heady, hebic whirl of debate and dice-box in
which his life rotated to contemplate with his usual
unrebrained enthusiasm the unsophibicated pleasures
of life at Olney.

235 Cov}per

His work gained him more than admirers: it
gained him disciples. In the winter of 1786 a young
man called at We^lon, who said his name was Rose,
and that he had come to bring Cowper the compliments
of some Scottish professors. It was only a pretext.
Samuel Rose, like many of his contemporaries, if we
are to believe the verbose mural tablets put up to them
by their relations, lived a life “ dedicated to the pursuit
of virtue.” His every aft was part of a deliberate
and considered scheme of self-improvement. He had
worked conscientiously at the University, and now, at
the age of twenty, he worked conscientiously at the
London Bar. Refleftion suggefted to him that he
would be benefited both morally and intelleftually by
intercourse with a man of genius who was also a man
of virtue. Such a charafter is notoriously rare, but
Rose believed he would find it in Cowper. Unluckily,
he had not given that time to the cultivation of the
social graces that he devoted to that of solid worth;
with the result that his manners were ftilted and awk¬
ward: and at firft it seemed probable that he would
go away before any of the desired beneficial intercourse
had been achieved. However, in time Cowper’s taft
and sympathy broke through his reserve. Poor
Rose I he turned out to be a very simple-minded young
man, naive and candid, and he confessed to Cowper in
a gush of confidence that he had been shy all his life,
even of his own father. He was touchingly grateful
for kindness; in a short time had loft his heart to
Cowper and everything to do with him. “ I here feel
no reftraint, and none is wished to be inspired,” he
wrote to his sifter on a later visit. ...” We rise
at whatever hour we choose; breakfast at half after
nine, take about an hour to satisfy the sentiment^ not
the appedte, for we talk—good heavens ! how we talk 1
and enjoy ourselves moft wonderfully. Then we

The Stricken Deer

236

separate—Mr, Cowper to Homer, Mr. Rose to
transcribing what is translated, Lady Hesketh to work
and to books alternately. Mrs. Unwin, who in every¬
thing but her face is like a kind angel come from heaven
to guard the health of our poet, is busy in domeftic
concerns. At one, our labours finished, the poet and
I walk for two hours. I then drink moft plentiful
draughts of inftruftion which flow from his lips,
in^ruftion so sweet and goodness so exquisite that
one loves it for its flavour. At three we return and
dress, and the succeeding hour brings dinner upon
the table and colleds again the smiling countenances
of the family to partake of the neat and elegant meal.
Conversation continues till tea-time, when an enter¬
taining volume engrosses our thoughts till the lail
meal is announced. Conversation again, and then
reft before twelve to enable us to rise again to the same
round of innocent virtuous pleasure.” It was delight¬
ful to find that anything so improving could be so
enjoyable. Cowper for his part liked Rose very much,
urged him to ftruggle againft his shyness, to see more
of the world, and to go and call on Lady Hesketh
in London. Rose agreed. But the thought of beard¬
ing, so to speak, a lady of title in her own den was
so formidable to him that it was months before he
could mufter up courage to follow Cowper’s advice.

Cowper’s other disciple was also shy. He was a
second cousin on his mother’s side, called John
Johnson, a Cambridge undergraduate. And, inspired
with an admiration for Cowper’s poetry, he took
advantage of the relationship to propose himself to ftay
in the January of 1790. He had an eager, ingenuous
face that attrafted Cowper at once; but for the firft
three days he sat with bright eyes and blushing cheeks
unable to ftammer out a word. At laft, however,
Cowper melted his reserve as he had melted Rose’s.

237 Life oj Cowper

And Johnson was revealed as a warm-hearted, untidy
boy, who threw himself into whatever he was doing,
scribbled poetry, played the fiddle, chattered, giggled,
and tripped up over the furniture with the same charm¬
ing, clumsy impetuosity. He was, indeed, as clumsy
as a young colt; and, colt-like, when he walked in the
fields would suddenly break into a frisk, a skip or a
gambol. Nqt that there was anything untamed about
him. His frolics were always gentle and innocent;
if a serious subjeft was mentioned he became suitably
serious at once; and he was going to be a clergyman.
He had a tender conscience, too. A few days after
he arrived he asked Cowper’s opinion on a poem
which he said had been written by one of his friends.
Cowper gave it, and Johnson confessed with shame
that he had written the poem himself. As can be
imagined, Cowper did not find much difficulty in
forgiving such a deception, but it continued to worry
Johnson, who, after he had gone back to Cambridge,
wrote profuse apologies. He would have done any¬
thing not to annoy Cowper. By temperament a hero-
worshipper, he met him at the very age when such a
temperament is moll susceptible; and he fell under
his sway even more completely than Rose had done,
hung on his every word, counted it his highest privilege
to do him a service. He offered to take back all of the
Homer that was ready to Cambridge in order to copy
it out. This, however, with a wise di^ruft of the
discretion of undergraduates, Cowper politely but
earnestly refused. But he had grown very fond of
Johnson. He would have been disposed to love
anyone connected with his mother; and Johnson’s
spontaneity and gaiety and innocence were ju^l the
qualities Cowper had always liked in people. Besides,
he felt him a little like himself as a young man : it was
almo^ as if he were his son. Cowper was a born

The Stricken Deer 238

father, and there is a pathos in the way all his paternal
feeling, deprived by an untoward fate of natural outlet,
now flowed on to Johnson. How it pleased him to
guide his tables, to direft his Judies—charafteriftically,
he told him to give up metaphysics and mathematics as
sterile intelleftual frivolities—to take pleasure in his
successes, to sympathize over his failures, to warn, to
exhort, to spoil him. His friendship grew only
second in importance to that Cowper felt for Harriet.
He longed for them to like each other, and introduced
them. It was a great success. They had the same
vivacity, the same respeftability, the same love of
innocent jokes. To Johnson, Harriet appeared lit
up by all the reflefted glory of Cowper’s affeftion;
while she, for all her fifty years, had not so far forgotten
the triumphs of her youthful beauty as no longer to
take pleasure in the attentions of an agreeable young
man. Of course, she soon had a nickname for him
—Sir John Croydon—and she wrote him a great
many letters, moSlly about Cowper, it is true, but not
without a touch of personal archness. Johnson’s corre¬
spondence was much increased by his new acquaint¬
ance. He wrote to her, he wrote to Cowper; to begin
with, he wrote to Mrs. Unwin. Somehow this
drojmed, and Cowper, very anxious that Marjf should
not feel left out of it with his new friend, administered
a gentle reproof—" One letter of hers,’’ he assured
Johnson, “ from the point of real utility and value, is
worth twenty of mine.”

Both Rose and Johnson came often to Stay. It was
an excellent thing for Cowper, apart from his affection
for them; for they could do things his woman friends
could not—help with Homer, or take him for long
walks. Cowper’s increased social adlivities had not
diminished his pleasure in Nature. Indeed, it grew
Stronger every year. Long association Strengthened

239 9f Coviper

this feeling, as it ^rengthened all his others. There
was not a field, a path, a blade of grass that was not
heavy with memories for him by now. Whenever he
caught sight of Olney spire rising in the distance he
thought of Newton and the hours he had spent there
with him; if he passed a ftile or a tree where he had
walked with a friend, involuntarily he would recall
what the friend had said to him there. Even things
of the intelleft had natural associations for him. He
always read outdoors if possible, because he knew that
should he forget a passage the sight of the field or the
glade where he haa read it would bring it ail back to
him. The very passing of time he marked by the way
it registered itself on the face of Nature. Lady
Hesketh would come “ when the leaves grow yellow,”
a book would be published “ before the firSt roses ”;
in a moment of melancholy he beautifully warns a
correspondent againSl hoping too much from his
friendship, ” for the robin may whiStle on my grave
before next summer.” It seemed as if, as his body
declined back to the earth of which it was made, his
spirit tended insensibly to merge itself in the spirit of
earth, and see through her eyes.

Every day of his life, then, at the end of his morning’s
work, he would go upftairs, carefully put on his wig
and shoes and brown overcoat, and sally forth. But it
was pleasanter when he had someone to go with him.
He generally had, what with Rose and Johnson and
the Powleys and the Throckmortons. His acquaint¬
ance with Johnson had revived his connexion with
Donne relations, and they came to ^lay too : Johnson’s
siller, even shyer than himself; and her aunt, a placid
Mrs. Balls; and Cowper’s cousin Rose, whom he had
hot seen since he had dandled her on his knee when
he was a boy. Now she was a precise-featured Mrs.
Bodham, but very amiable, and in 1791 she and her

The Stricken Deer 240

husband ' came and ^ayed ten days—“ a parson’s
week.” Indeed, there were people flaying at Wefton
during the greater part of the year. Never since
he left London had Cowper’s days been so full, so
normal.

Alas! it did not mean that he enjoyed them more.
Had not hope departed i —and with hope other interefts
had loft their power to satisfy his mind. Not even
when he was enjoying them moft did he look on them
except as drugs that might for a moment delude him
into forgetting his sad fate, but were powerless to save
him. And, ftrong though the dose might be, the drug
did not always work. He had his black moments, and
they were black indeed. Now that January had twice
proved fatal to him it was an almoft unsupportable
period. And he began to be worried by an even
ftranger cause of fear. The moon, the full moon,
terrified him: he felt it an unholy power, able to make
men mad. With a pathetic flicker of humour he
tried to laugh himself out of this.

“ I’ll inilant write a moil severe lampoon,

Of which the subjefl shall be yonder moon,”

he said to Lady Hesketh once* when they drove home
beneath the cold brilliance of a winter’s night. But
he could maintain this mood of bravado only as long
as he was in company. When he was alone in his
bedroom, where the moonlight ftood in livid pools
on the floor and filled the walls with dim huge shadows,
an unaccountable panic would fteal into his heart, and
he would remember his damnation and tremble.
Newton had feared the moon, too. In these prosaic-
seeming Evangelicals of the eighteenth century there
lurked a wild ataviftic ftrain. They were not called
“ enthusiafts ” for nothing. And in their prim
parlours Artemis the Deftroyer could ftill ftrike terror.

241 Lije oj Cou'per

Cowper felt his fears, too, more persistently dangerous
than before. So precarious did his peace of mind
become that he even refused for a time to write any¬
thing againSl slavery, leSl it might upset him. And
when his days were happieSl he could pass a night
of torment. Indeed, the contracts presented by his
life at this time were extraordinary. Never before
had the incongruous Strains of which it was made up
appeared in such Startling, such fantaStic proximity.
At one moment he might be sitting in the cosy,
unromantic little parlour at WeSton with Mary and
Harriet and perhaps Mrs. Frog,’' drinking tea and
joking and mildly gossiping; himself the gentle life
and soul of the little gathering, to all appearance com¬
pletely satisfied to discuss how a fox had been killed
at Kilwick Wood or if there was to be a new curate at
Olney. Then bedtime would come. With smiling,
decorous friendliness Cowper would see Mrs. Frog
to the door, and retire to his room. He crossed the
threshold into a world of visionary horror; where the
comfortable veil of the Hesh was torn asunder, where
the voice of God Himself could be heard speaking
in His wrath, and the flames of hell leapt at the very
window, and in the corners frightful fiends crouched,
ready to spring. After a few hours of broken sleep
came daylight, and then once more Cowper would dress
and come down and enter for another few weeks, as
it seemed with complete peace of mind, the humdrum
world of an eighteenth-century country village.

There is something terrifying about such a mixture.
Nightmare and madness seem doubly awful concealed
in surroundings outwardly so prosaically calm. If such
a mode of life does not bring peace of mind one feels
none can. Nothing he can do, nowhere he can go,
is of any use to protect man against the invisible
onslaught of his soul. However, the mixture was all
u

The Stricken Deer 242

Cowper hoped for now. Despairing of cure, he
devoted all his efforts to keeping as he was, to main¬
taining the balance between night and day, and if he
could get no better, at any rate to get no worse. And
for three years vitality and care combined to enable him
to do it. It was for three years only. In 1790 the
balance began to dip ever so slightly on the side of
night. It was partly due to the passage of time. Mere
recreation ceases to diftraft as it grows more familiar;
while misery becomes growingly hard to bear. But
besides this, Cowper was now near sixty; and he could
not forget it could not be long before his death—
death I which had been for him the ultimate horror
since he was a boy, and which, according to his present
views, was to introduce him to an eternity of anguish.
In face of such a prospeft he was not likely to be com¬
forted by the society of a few old friends and by
country walks. Both the one and the other served
rather to put him in mind of the flight of time, a
flight that every day seemed swifter. “ A yellow
shower of leaves is falling continually from all the
trees in the country,” he writes. “ A few moments
only seem to have passed since they were buds, and in
a few moments more they will have disappeared. . . .
It is impossible for a man conversant with such scenes
as surround me not to advert daily to the shortness
of his exigence here, admonished of it as he muft be
by ten thousand objefts. There was a time when I
could contemplate my present ^late and consider
myself as a thing of a day with pleasure, and I remem¬
bered seasons as they passed in swift rotation as a
schoolboy remembers the days that interpose between
the next vacation when he shall see his parents and
enjoy his home again. But to make so juA an e^imate
of life as this ds no longer in rrty power. I would
live and live always, and am become such another

243 ^ Covoftr

wretch as Maecenas, who wished for long life, he
cared not at what expense of sufferings.”

Nor was this the only way in which the passage of
years affefted his spirits. For some time he had been
a semi-invalid. He suffered from lumbago, from
a^igmatism, from indigestion; while the Strain of
his spiritual troubles had shattered his nervous syStem.
The smallest hitch in the ordered progress of his day
put him in a fever of anxiety. If Lady Hesketh failed
to write he immediately came to the conclusion that
she was dying; and once, when he was woken up by a
party of drunken revellers reeling paSt the house, he
could not sleep for the reSt of the night, and even on
the following evening was Still too much affedted to dine
with the Throckmortons.

He was very careful of himself, and Studied his
ailments with that conscientious zeal which people of
uneventful life are prone to devote to their own health.
He consulted various doctors. They recommended
Strange remedies. For several minutes every day
Cowper excoriated his naked back with a brush for the
good of his lumbago; while at one time he tried to
cure his indieeStion by taking an emetic every week.
He did not like to interrupt his work, so when the
Strenuous day came round he would sit throughout the
morning, basin and manuscript side by side before
him, alternately versifying and vomiting. Disagree¬
able though they were, these remedies did him no
good; and now, as with advancing age his power of
resistance weakened, his health got worse. He felt
feeble and ill all the time; which m its turn made him
more liable to depression and les^ able to throw it off.

Finally, in June 1791, he finished his Homer, and
was left with nothing to do. This had always been
bad for him, ever since early days in the Temple, and
since 1774 one of the Strongest chains that bound

The Stricken Deer 244

him to sanity had been regular work. Now it was
taken away when he was already disposed to melan¬
choly by railing health and spirits. The effedl was
immediate, although it was in the summer. By
September his nervous condition was definitely begin¬
ning to get worse. He realized it, and his daily
occupations and intere^s began to lose such attradlion
as they ^till possessed for him. Powerless to sustain
him in a real crisis, as he had painfully learnt in 1771,
they now proved themselves incapable in the long
run of maintaining a hold on his attention, even in a
period of comparative mental peace. What he had
been told about them in the days of his conversion had
turned out to be perfedly true: they were false gods
that seduced a man from following the true, only to
fail him in the end. And it was also true that the
only people he knew who were happy were those with
faith. Faith—the humble, unquestioning faith of a
village woman who knew no more of the world than
she could spell out from her Bible—was better worth
having than all that society and learning and fame
could offer one; faith that removes mountains could
even give peace to the heart of man. Now, at the end
of his life, after trying to keep it out of his thoughts
for twenty years, he sought once more the consolation
of religion. He had no new experience which might
encourage him to think he would get it, not one spark
of his old ec^asy lit up his horizon. But his vitality
was ^lill too strong to let him resign himself to despair :
he ^fill struggled involuntarily towards any gleam of
hope. And religion was the only source of hope in
which he now believed. In spite of his conviction of
his personal damnation, his creed did teach that God’s
pity was infinite ; so that there was a chance he might
be saved even if his condemnation had been declared.
Anyway, it was the only chance there was. But

245 (^owper

unless he could revive his faith, he knew he would not
get it. Turning in disguil and disappointment from
the pleasures and preoccupations of the world, he
sought desperately, hopelessly, anywhere, anyhow, for
anyone, who might revive the spark within him.

This search was the origin of a curious episode.
Samuel Teedon, the schoolmaster of Olney, was one
of those eccentricities who seem to be an unavoidable
by-product of a great religious movement. In himself
he was the kind of man who is equally incapable
of inspiring respedt or dislike; a well-meaning,
industrious little creature, but trivial, self-important,
and silly. He was a dreadful bore, too. If he met
you he never left you alone; and his conversation was
what one might expedt of a feeble intelledt that
had always known more than the people that it
lived among. It consisted of tedious anecdote,
diversified by floods of apologetic and irrelevant
digression, and couched in a pretentious jargon of his
own invention, founded on the view that a long Latin
word is always better than a short English one. He
called wine “ inebriating fluid and flowers “ varie¬
gated flora.’’ Nor were his circumStances more pre¬
possessing than his personality. He lived with a
handful of squalid relatives; either they or he were
always ill, and he was miserably poor. This laSt added
to the horror felt by others for his company. When he
was not boring them he was begging from them. So
far there was nothing about him to call for special
notice. But he had been converted to Evangelicalism.
He was the very la^ man whom it could do good to.
Incapable of the devotion which was its virtue he was
only too disposed to that hyfteria which was its defed:.
Nor was the narrow, monotonous life of a country
village likely to keep this hyderia within check.
So far was it from doing so, in faft, that he became

The Stricken Deer

246

possessed with the idea that he v^s the especial
favourite of God, Who communicated with him direft
by some spiritual channel unknown. It seems likely
that he evolved this view with the subconscious
intention of obtaining some compensation for his
failure to ftand out among his fellows in other ways.
But Evangelicalism gave him grounds for it by its
insiftence that the despised of this world were more
acceptable in the eyes of Heaven than the great. His
cele^ial connexion certainly did not better his mundane
situation, if we are to judge from a diary he left.
Neither his own health nor that of his relations im¬
proved, though he solicited the especial benediftion
of Heaven every time either took the smallell remedy.
” Very ill at home,” he writes, “ but through mercy
cured by drinking very freely of brandy,” and again,
“ My cousin took some red bark, which I hope the
Lord will bless.” He remained so poor that whenever
he had anything extra to eat he entered it in his diary
with pathetic and detailed precision ; and his religion,
far from making him less, made him more boring to
other people, even to his spiritual diredlors. “ Went
in the morn to church and heard Mr. B. from ‘ spare
the rod.’ In the noon went to Weilon. Mr. B.
overtook me, but never spoke, though juft by on the
other side of the hedge, and seemed fearful by his own
velocity of my overtaking him.”

Teedon’s Evangelicafism had brought him into
touch with Cowper and Mary years before, and he was
always in and out of the house. Cowper soon found
him as much a bore as everybody else did. He was
easily embarrassed, and he never knew when Teedon
was moft embarrassing: when he expatiated with
unftuous self-appreciation on his spiritual privileges,
when he laboriously pointed out the beft passages in
” The Task ” to Cowper as if afraid he might have

247 Cowper

overlooked them, or when he thanked him in a strain
of pretentious compliment for his kindness, “ I have
wanted all my life,” he declared one evening, “ to be
connected with a man of genius and ability, and,”
turning to Cowper, “ in this worthy gentleman I have
found it.” “ You may suppose that I felt the sweat
gush out on my forehead when I heard the speech,”
said the sensitive Cowper, ” and if ybu do you will not
be at all mistaken.” He had not the heart to snub
anyone so well-intentioned and so stupid. But for
twenty years he had avoided Teedon as much as possible.

Now, however, in his desperate effort to retrieve
his faith, his attitude towards him underwent a change.
Here was a man who had the very faith he longed for,
the pearl of great price for which he was ready to sell
all that he had. Even if he was tiresome by worldly
standards, that ought not to matter. Were not
worldly ^andards those that had proved themselves
moft hollow and moft inadequate ? God was no
respedler of persons; He spoke through those whom
the world esteemed foolish and despicable. Cowper
should humble himself before any soul whom God
had thought worthy to illu^lrate with the faith refused
to him. And if Teedon claimed that he had special
communication with Heaven, who was Cowper to
deny it ? Should he not rather take advantage of it,
and through his mediation learn what the Divine
Will had in ^lore for himself, induce even a ray of
the Divine Grace to fall on himAs the princesses
of ancient Russia prostrated themselves before idiots
as the bleSl of God, so Cowper humbly sought the
spiritual direction of Teedon. He asked him for his
prayers, took no decision of any moment without
Risking Teedon to find out what was Heaven’s will in
the matter. He did his beSl to make some return
for his kindness by giving him countless meals and

The Stricken Deer 248

an allowance of ^^30 a year. For his part, Teedon
took Cowper’s interest as a great honour, prayed for
him by the hour, and was never too tired to toil over
to We^lon to retail any spiritual message he might
have received. It was not long before he had to
deliver one of importance.

In October 1791, Johnson, Cowper’s publisher,
wrote to him saying he was contemplating a new and
sumptuous edition of Milton to be illu^Irated by
famous artiAs; and he asked Cowper to edit it. He
was not attracted by the proposal, which sounded
laborious without being interesting ; but Still the offer
might be providential. He himself had no means
by which to penetrate the wishes of Providence; so
he asked Teedon if he would make intercession to
discover it. Teedon announced that God had direftly
called him to the work, which He would make a
blessed one for him. Cowper Still felt an aversion
from it; but of course there was now no possibility
of hesitation. With the solemnity and deliberation
befitting the execution of a divinely-appointed mission,
he set to work. But before he had got further than
the preliminary preparations a sensational event took
place, which rent the whole texture of his life from
top to bottom. One afternoon towards the end of
December, as he was sitting working with Mary in
the parlour, he suddenly heard her cry, “ Oh, Mr.
Cowper, don’t let me fall! ” He jumped up juSf in
time to save her from falling to the ground uncon¬
scious. A doftor was summoned, who attempted to
reassure Cowper’s white face and agitated queftiort
by telling him she had only had a nervous seizure of
an insignificant kind. But when she recovered con¬
sciousness she saw everything upside down, and
walked and spoke with the greatest difficulty. And
Cowper knew perfeftly well she had had a ftroke.

249 ?/ Cowper

In face of such a cataftrophe, all other plans and
considerations vanished from Cowper’s mind. It had
always been agony to him to watch anyone suffer,
but how much more when the sufferer was Mary—
Mary, his oldeft, nearest, deare^l friend, with whom
he had lived for twenty-six years, to whom he owed
health, sanity, even life itself. Most likely, he felt,
with a fearful qualm of conscience, she had made
herself ill by working for him. He felt he could
never re^l, or read, or think on any other subjeft till
she was well again. And he had a more personal
reason for wishing her recovery: as he looked at her
prostrate form, the thought came unbidden to his
head, Perhaps she is going to die ” ; perhaps he
would have to finish the hSt fteps of his bleak journey
alone. The prospeft was too terrible to contemplate,
even for a moment. He brushed it aside, but he
could not wholly forget it; and it gave an added
desperation to his struggle. At whatever co^l, with
whatever difficulty, she mu^l be saved. He gave up
his whole life to the task. The order of his exigence
was turned upside down. The calls of his own health,
his own spirits, were disregarded: Milton itself, the
task set him by God, was put aside—not finally, of
course, but until a more convenient moment. Such
work as he did, such letters as he wrote, were done
at odd times when he was not wanted by Mary. He
nursed her, he read to her, he helped her in her fir^f
feeble attempts to walk. As the weeks passed, it
seemed he was to be repaid for his efforts. A firft
stroke is often not a severe one. By March, Mary,
though ilill weak, was able to walk and work and talk
almost as well as before. It seemed likely she would
get perfedlly well, Cowper's fears began to wane,
and his spirits rose. They were further heightened
by the entry of a new friend into his life.

The Stricken Deer

250

In March 1792 Cowper received a letter from a
Mr. William Hayley; who said he was writing the
life of Milton, and he thought it would be of advantage
to both of them to work together. The letter was
written in a rhapsodical ftyle, flowery with compli¬
ments, and it concluded with a sonnet of admiration.
Cowper, however, felt far too glad of any help with
Milton to be critical. A correspondence was opened;
and in May Hayley came to We^fon for a visit
Before the Granger’s arrival, Cowper was, as usual,
overcome by nerves. Perhaps he might not like
Hayley: supposing he should be put off by his
appearance—he judged a great deal by appearance—
he would never be able to conceal his feelings for
several weeks. However, Hayley’s tall military figure,
his eyes bright beneath their bushy brows, did not
displease him; and after a few days of his company
he had admitted him into the small circle of his great
friends.

He was very different from his other friends.
Like Newton, indeed, he wrote his Memoirs; but
there the likeness ends. Hayley’s book was a mag¬
nificent affair: two lately quarto volumes with a
^feel-engraved frontispiece, an elaborate dedication to
Lord Holland and two thousand or so leisurely spaced,
elegantly printed pages. But the magnificence of its
dress, and ifill more the unfaltering grandiloquence
of the ^fyle in which it was written, only served to
throw out in more startling relief the pathetic absurdity
of the ^ory it told. This incongruity was the central
feature of Hayley’s exigence. With the loftieil
aspirations, and talents above the ordinary, it was
his sad fate to be generally unsuccessful and always
ridiculous. It was not the fault of his charafter,
which was an excellent one: warm-hearted, dis¬
interested and industrious. But he had a. romantic

251 Life pf Cowper

temperament, no sense of humour and, like Marianne
Dashwood, he had learnt his view of life from the
literature of sensibility.

Of all dead-and-gone habits of mind, that expressed
in the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility is the
hardest to enter into. How could people, even in
imagination, take a view of life so flagrantly false to
every faft of their experience and observation } It is
even more incredible that anyone should have looked
at their own life in such a way. But Hayley did.
In the clear-sighted, plain-spoken world of Smollett
and Dr. Johnson he managed to be, and to remain,
the complete “ Man of Feeling,” who shed the tear
of sensibility at a beautiful prospeft, who could not
without emotion so violent that it made him ill revisit
the scene of a former happiness, who would rather die
than offend in the smalleft degree the delicacy of an
elegant female, who would ilarve sooner than ilain
his honour by receiving a gift, whose heart was ready
to thrill at any moment with filial affeftion, love of
solitude, and the “passion for freedom.” His mother
—he had lo^l his father young—had intended him to
be a lawyer. But to such a temperament the idea .of
a regular profession seemed intolerably philiftine, and
when he was twenty-one he announced that he intended
to devote his life to benefiting mankind by any means
in his power, but chiefly by composing literary works
of an improving charadler. It was very high-minded
of him, because he had no money, and philanthropy
has never been remunerative. But Hayley was
optimiftic, and had, as he charafteri^lically put it, a
contempt for money “ romantic and imprudent.”
Nor was he without grounds for confidence in his
literary powers. Had he not written an ode on the
birth of the Prince of Wales which had won the
commendation of Dr. Roberts of Eton College ? He

The Stricken Deer 252

started off, therefore, with high hopes. Unfortun¬
ately Fate had endowed him with bad luck as sensa¬
tional as his aspirations. He worked like a trooper,
he laughed at failure, he was always ready with a
new idea, he was delighted to modify what he had
done in the light of any criticism. But somehow he
never could make a success.

His firil efforts were a tragedy, which he sent to
Garrick, and an epistle of compliment, which he sent
to the King of Poland. Garrick refused the tragedy,
and the epi^lle was lo^l before it ever got to Poland
at all. By 1771 Hayley ran short of money. Undis¬
couraged, he retired to Eartham, in Surrey, where,
amid the shades of rural retirement, notoriously
inspiring to poets, he began to compose an epic
about Stephen Langton; a subjeft which, he felt,
would both give scope to his own passion for freedom
and Simulate it in others. However, he had hardly
written a canto before he contracted an illness in his
eyes and was forced to Clop. A period of idleness in
the company of his wife and mother seems to have
persuaded him that there were other benefits of which
mankind Ctood in even more pressing need than of the
passion for freedom; for when he began work again
in 1781 it was at a poem entitled “The Triumphs
of Temper,” expressly designed to exhibit “ the
effects of spleen in the female character ” and to
induce “ his fair readers to cultivate a constant flow
of good humour.” For once he made a success.
The poem went into several editions: it gained him
a place among the leading poets of the day; and he
had the gratification to learn from the “ good and
sensible mother of a large family ” that it had entirely
reformed the temper of her eldeCt daughter. Alas!
this success was not to laCt. His romantic and
imprudent contempt for money soon made away with

253 Cowper

any that he had earned; and when he tried to make
some more, bad luck once again began to dog his
footsteps. He wrote a tragedy about a mad Javanese
Sultan, but on the very eve of its produdfion George III
went mad, and the delicacy of a loyal subjeft com¬
pelled Hayley to withdraw it. Then he wrote a
novel designed to promote the interests of religion,
and dealing with the striking subjedl of “ an elegant
young widow struggling between her maternal affec¬
tions and an attachment of the heart to an engaging
young infidel.” It was dedicated to the Archbishop
of Canterbury; but there is no record that he read
it nor any one else either. An opera adapted from
the German fared no better, though Hayley had
embellished it by a transformation scene in which
“ magical personages ” congratulated the British de¬
fenders of the Rock of Gibraltar, Finally, despairing
of success on the English Stage, he wrote a play in
French, and somehow managed to get it produced in
Paris. Paris muSl have been a very different place
from what it is now. The play railed because it
contained among its dramatis persona a courtesan, and
the public representation of such a charadter proved
insupportable to the modeSly of a French audience.
Even Hayley’s hopes were checked by this rebuff', and
he Slopped writing for the Stage.

His private life had not proved more successful
than his public. With his mother—“ a lady,” he
tells us, “ noted chiefly for her majeSty ”—he got on
well enough; but before he was twenty he had fallen
in love, and, true to the tradition of the sentimental
novel, corresponded with the objedt of his affedtion,
a Miss Fanny Page, clandestinely, with the help of
a friend of hers—Miss Eliza Ball. But other
friends made trouble, and Miss Page broke the
connedlion off. Hayley was, however, as ready to

The Stricken Deer

254

cut his losses in love as in art, and without more ado
transferred his attentions to Miss Ball. Her mother
was mad, and Mrs. Hayley sought-to discourage her
son from his new love affair; saying, no doubt with
her usual majesty, that such affliffions were hereditary,
and Miss Ball might go mad too. “ In that case,”
replied Hayley magnificently, “ I should bless my
God for having given me courage sufficient to make
myself the lawful guardian of the mo^f amiable and
pitiable woman on earth.” And he married her.
He lived to regret it. For the firft few years, indeed,
Eliza was a charming wife, as full of sensibility as
himself, and so liberal in her views that she agreed
to adopt and bring up as her own a child of his
by a woman of Eartham village. But by 1781 she
began to change; by 1783 she was in a confirmed
ftate of nervous collapse. Poor Hayley was very far
from thanking God he was her guardian. Indeed
she was intolerable—sometimes silent and moodily
suspicious, sometimes in violent fits of hysteria. Her
sensibility became so acute that she would not come
near him when he was ill, for fear of ruining her eye¬
sight by the amount of tears the sight of his suffer¬
ings would cause her to shed. And when she did
feel equal to seeing him, she did not make herself
pleasant. ” You were the moft agreeable man in
the world,” she remarked one day, with an innocent
sincerity which muft have made the remark doubly
mortifying, “ but you seem to have lo^ all your
talents.”

He became unable to ^and life with her for long
at a time, and sent her, “ with affectionate solicitude,”
on visits to Bath. But this was very expensive;
besides, she came back between whiles. And even
a day of her grew more than he could bear.* There
was no doubt they muCl live apart. Mrs. Hayley,

255 °f

now always alluded to as “ my pitiable Eliza,” was
quite willing to go: she found Hayley as trying as
he found her. But it was not so easy to arrange.
Where was she to go to ? She liked Bath ; but Bath,
as he knew to his coft, encouraged her to be extrava¬
gant. At la^l he made arrangements with an old
mend of his. Dr. Berridge, to take her in as a paying
gue^l. Juil when he thought he had got her settled
there Dr. Berridge died, and she came back. It was
not till 1789 that he had her safely established with
” a respeftable circle of friends ” at Derby. Even
after this, there came an awful moment when
she heard he was ill and she wrote to say that she
felt it her duty to come back and nurse him. He
rushed to his writing-table and with a desperate
eloquence besought her not to come. His only wish
was for her happiness; and it might make her ill:
let them rather communicate ” by the frequent inter¬
course of affeftionate letters.” Their language to
each other had, indeed, grown more high-flown as
their feelings cooled; and by the time they were
living apart it was of a rhapsodical silliness that
mu^l be seen to be believed. They vied with
each other in declarations of devotion in order to
keep each other away. Eliza achieved the ma^ler-

f )iece in this kind when she implored Hayley to write
ess often, as the excitement of reading his letters was
so great, that it prevented her from sleeping.

Repeated setbacks had not quenched the fire of
Hayley’s spirit. There was something heroic in his
incapacity to profit by experience. Plays might be
damned, books fail to sell; after each successive blow
he reappeared with eyes Aill bright and bearing ftill
ere^l, undismayed and enthusiaftic, ready with a new
scheme for the benefit of mankind, confident that thu
time it would succeed. The world he looked on was

The Stricken Deer 256

ftill the world of sentimental literature: he himself
was ^ill the “ Man of Feeling.”

Even the ironical comedy of his own career he
managed to re-^age in the theatre of his memory as
a drama of sentiment: its hero “ The Hermit of
Eartham,” a man of genius who retires undefeated by
the blows of an unworthy world to a life of contem¬
plation ; its heroine, his wife, brilliant and elegant,
but too exquisitely sensitive to ^land the rough
friftion of common life. In this guise his pa^l could
be contemplated without dissatisfaflion, even with
complacency.

In plain faft his life at this time did have its com¬
pensations, apart from the fa£t that he had got rid of
Eliza. There were other ways of benefiting mankind
than writing tragedies. All his life Hayley had pro¬
moted schemes—a new and nobler edition of Shake¬
speare, or the eredion of a ^latue to Howard the
philanthropic—and he continued to do so now. Nor
had he Copped writing poetry. It was moCly
occasional verse, but Cill designed to further some
good objeC. Epitaphs, for inCance—he was always
ready to write an epitaph, whether he knew the man
it was about or whether he did not, in order to soothe
the sufferings of the bereaved by publishing the virtues
of the deceased. And almoC every day saw the com¬
position of a lyric designed to reconcile an unhappily
married couple of his acquaintance, or to promote
charity to decayed musicians, or to encourage Mr.
Wright the painter to disregard malicious criticism.
One day Hayley read some of his poetry aloud to
Gibbon. At the end Gibbon remarked with great
animation, “ When you began to read I was suffering
from gout, but you have charmed away my sense of
pain.” Such is the only recorded occasion when
Hayley’s poetry did succeed in benefiting mankind:

257 Lije oj Cowper

it was unlucky that it was also the only recorded
occasion when it was not intended to.

The mention of Gibbon brings one to Hayley’s main
source of happiness at this time. His longing to be an
ornament to the race inspired in him a hero-worship of
anyone who was; and he had always sought to get to
know such men. With such effeft that he became
the intimate friend of Romney, Flaxman, Blake,
Gibbon and Howard. The Grange thing is that
they should have liked him. But his admiration,
though, like everything else about him, rather silly,
was, also like everything else about him, sincere.,
And no one dislikes sincere admiration. Besides, all
his virtues, his enthusiasm and generosity and dis¬
interestedness, went to make him a good friend: he
was always ready to liSten, to appreciate, even to give
practical help. As a result Eartham became a minor
centre of the world of art and letters. He had spent
a large part of his meagre earnings in building him¬
self a library, adorned with portraits of geniuses whom
he knew, and presided over, appropriately enough,
by a large picture of Sensibility watering the sensitive
plant, by Romney. There of an evening would the
great men sit and take their ease; and sometimes
one of the painters made a sketch, and sometimes
one of the writers read his lateft work, and all the
time Hayley hovered round and rhapsodised and
admired.

It was this enthusiasm for genius that made him
scrape acquaintance with Cowper. And he had no
difficulty in making Cowper like him. After a year’s
anxiety, sharpened by self-diilruft, shadowed by a con-
viftion of impending damnation, it was wonderfully
soothing to spend the day with someone who thought all
one's work of the firft value and who was convinced it
was only a prelude to greater things. Hayley had
s

The Stricken Deer 258

too, in supreme degree, that quality of vitality which
Cowper had always looked for in his friends, which
had drawn him to people as different from each other
as Newton and Lady Au^len and Mary. Since
Mary’s illness he had been without such support,
and now he reposed on Hayley as a tired swimmer
on a buoyant wave. In addition to this, Hayley was
the firft professional literary man Cowper had met
since he became a poet, the firif friend he could talk
to,about his work on equal terms. And talk they
did; and read each other’s works and criticized and
admired. It was no wonder that within a few weeks
Cowper’s liking had warmed to llrong affection.
Hayley, for his part, had even less difficulty in feeling
enthusiailic about Cowper than about other things.
Never, among all the geniuses of his acquaintance,
had he met one so courteous, so mode^, so gentle.
Cowper’s love for Mary’ and his intense desire that
the visitor should appreciate her, especially moved
him. “ It seems hardly possible to survey human
nature in a more touching and satisfaftory point of
view,” he remarked.

The growing friendship was soon ^rengthened by
a tenser bond. One morning, as Hayley and Cowper
were coming back from a walk, they were met by a
messenger who told them Mary had been taken by
another attack. Cowper rushed home to find her
speechless, helpless and almoft blind. It was a
second stroke—far worse than the firft. In a moment
of terrible illumination he realized that his darkest
fear was now a pradical possibility, that his hopes
had been delusive, and she might be going to die.
At once all his moft sombre convictions crowded back
into his mind, and he saw this new disaster as the la^t
inevitable aCl in the course of his tragedy. How could
he have expeCled anything different ? Was he not

259 Life oj Cowper

the cursed of God ? Surely therefore the moft dis-
a^rous event was always the moft likely. Beside
himself with anguish, his face working, his eyes wild
with sorrow, he tottered from the room. Hayley
met him outside. “ There is a wall of separation,”
cried Cowper, “ between me and my God.” ” So
there is,” replied Hayley instantly, “ but I can inform
you that I am the moft remarkable mortal on earth
at pulling down old walls, and by the living God I
will not leave a ^lone landing of the wall you speak
of.” He spoke without thought, from a mere impulse
to say something that would comfort Cowper. His
words had an immediate and formidable effeft.
Eagerly Cowper scanned his face for a moment:
then a serene calm overspread his features, and taking
Hayley by the hand, he said, “ I believe you.” Hay-
ley’s words of comfort, ^riking his ear as they did at
such a crucial moment," had inspired him with the con¬
viction that he was a heavenly messenger sent to help
him. And from that moment he submitted himself
to Hayley’s direftion with the unquestioning truSl
due to an angel of God. Hayley assumed his new
responsibilities with his usual sanguine energy, recom¬
mended electric treatment for Mary, showed how to
administer it, wrote for further advice from a do< 5 tor
in London. By the end of May she was a little
better, and he went away. Cowper felt his Strength
was leaving him. ” Farewell,” he said, pressing
Hayley’s hand with passionate tenderness, “ farewell,
I ne’er shall look upon thy like again.” A< 5 tually he
was to see him again very soon. Hayley had urged
him to bring Mary to Eartham if she was Strong
enough for the journey, as he was sure the air there
would do her good. By AuguSt she was well enough,
and they Started. Cowper could have shown no
greater proof of the ascendancy Hayley had acquired

The Stricken Deer

260

over him. He had never gone back on that decision
to retire from the world made at St. Alban’s thirty
years before. Indeed, except for his visit to Cam¬
bridge when John was dying, he had only travelled
twice, and neither time back into the world. He
had moved from one sequestered sanctuary at Hunting¬
don to another at Olney, and once again to WeSlon,
and each time he had intended the move to be a final
one. Now, at the age of sixty-two, when his health
was failing, he took a three days’ journey to Stay for
a short time with a man he had only seen for the
firSt time three months before, whose house was a
Stirring intelledtual centre of the day. Nor was re¬
entering the world a more draStic change in his life
than leaving WeSton. Long associations and love of
Nature had combined to weave his surroundings into
the texture of his life in such a way that without them
he felt as awkward as without.his skin. To take him
from them was like rooting up a tree from its soil.
If at any time he was asked to Slay away, he had
replied, with the brief finality of one declaring a law
of nature, that it was impossible. Now, however,
the objeft of his whole life was to cure Mary, and
Hayley, the messenger of God, had said that such a
change might aid her cure. There was no queSlion
that he muSl go. Indeed, her relapse had so deranged
the whole order of his existence that nothing seemed
impossible any more. Aftually, as the time drew
near he experienced qualms. In order to confirm
him in his decision he asked Teedon to inquire the
divine will in the matter. Teedon duly reported that
he had received a message: “ Go, and I will be with
him. . . . And he went to Bethel to inquire of the
Lord, who said, I will go down with thee into Egypt
and will bring thee up again.” This, if uncompli¬
mentary to Hayley, was favourable to visiting him.

261 Life of Cowper

Trembling with agitation, therefore, Cowper ^leeled
himself to go. The journey went more easily than he
could have expefted. They had Johnny and three
servants to look after them, and Mary felt little
fatigue. Cowper was only once disturbed: “when
'they crossed the Surrey hills at night. To his un¬
travelled eye they seemed as tremendous as the
Himalayas, and as they loomed up bare in the baleful
moonlight, a thrill of elemental terror ran through
him. All was forgotten, however, in the excitement
of arriving at Eartham. It muft have been an extra¬
ordinary moment for him. Thirty years before he
had fled from the world, wretched, broken, obscure;
now, in his old age, he returned famous, to receive
the homage of his diftinguished contemporaries.
Hayley had only asked a few people to meet him, but
they were all distinguished—Romney, Mrs. Charlotte
Smith the novelist, and later Hurdis the poet. They
were Struck not unfavourably by Cowper’s modeSty,
his awkward and punctilious courtesy, as of some
Rip van Winkle survived from a former age. Shy
and awkward, Cowper Stood blinking his eyes in the
unaccustomed sunlight of their attention. He soon
became happy enough in their company as long as
he was not expeCted to talk too much. All the same,
he was really happieSt, because moSt at his ease, in
the mornings when he and Hayley worked together
at Milton. He had translated some of Milton’s Latin
poems, and Hayley suggested corrections. The loyal
heart of Johnson was outraged by such impertinence.
It is to be feared neither he nor Lady Hesketh alto¬
gether approved of Hayley. Who was this Stranger
who had assumed so sudden and so complete a sway
over their “ bard ” ? A professional literary man, a
friend of Gibbon—Lady Hesketh had heard rumours
that he was an infidel. These proved untrue; but

The Stricken Deer

262

Johnson was disquieted to notice that he never went
to church, and he wondered whether such a friend
would promote Cowper’s happiness. Anyway, it was
intolerable that he should presume to correft his
poems.- Cowper did not mind himself. No amount
of admiration could make him vain; he even
welcomed the criticism of Hayley’s son Tom, a boy
of twelve. He was a pompous child, already the
true son of his father in the way he expressed him¬
self. “ Be assured that among all my young and
sprightly associates you are not forgotten,” he wrote
to his father from school. But Cowper was disposed
to feel more at ease with a child than with the other
people at Eartham, and Thomas Hayley finally won
his heart by the kind way in which he wheeled Mrs.
Unwin out in a chair. When Cowper parted from
him they both shed tears.

But he had not come to Eartham juft to make
friends, and they occupied a small part of his time.
Except for the early part of the morning, he was
with Mary; and at bottom his mind was concentrated
on the ftate of her health. At firft the change seemed
to do her good: her voice grew ftronger, her ftep
firmer. But a delicate woman of seventy is not likely
to recover from a second ftroke. And as the days
went by Cowper gradually became convinced the
change was doing her no good and that the journey
had failed in its objeft. With the realization, the
guft of preternatural energy that for the laft three
months had supported him, subsided. It had been
called out, it could only have been called out, to help
Mary. When it failed to help Mary it collapsed:
and his old inhibitions and prejudices reappeared,
all the ftronger for their brief eclipse. Talking to
ftrangers seemed an intolerable ftrain, the unfamiliar
landscape intolerably alien; he became consumed

263 Lije of CoTdoper

with a desire to go home. Early in September they
went.

This return to Wefton is momentous in Cowper’s
life; for with it the curtain rises on the laft a£l in its
weary tragedy. Alas! it was to end on no classic
note, “ in calm of mind all passion spent,” soothing
and reconciling even while it saddens. No, in the
Elizabethan manner, amid shriek and blood-boltered
spedtre and wild infernal darkness, was the scene to
close. For the lail time the forces of madness were
to rise and overwhelm him.

The events of the laft year had rendered them
irresiftible. Ever since 1787 he had, as we have
seen, only kept them at bay with the utmoft difficulty,
and already, a year ago, they had begun to gain
ground on him. Anything like a severe blow, and
the battle would be irretrievably lo^f. Aftually the
blow he did receive would have been fatal to him had
he never begun to weaken at all. Mary’s collapse
was far and away the greatest disa^er Cowper could
have su^lained at any time in the laft thirty years.
For it meant the collapse of the foundation on which
during that thirty years the whole order of his life
had been erected. Always dependent on someone,
on no one had he ever depended as on her. The
illness of 1773 had irremediably bent the ftem of his
existence; but by clinging to her he had managed to
train it to an upright position again. Afterwards, it
is true, he had erefted an elaborate ^rufture of occupa¬
tion and habit on which to maintain his mental health.
But he could never have got well enough to begin to
put it together without her. Finally under the strain
of his third madness it had fallen to bits ; and he was
left clinging to her once more. For she remained.
Alone in all his experience, she ^ayed with him in
light and darkness; and though all his faith in God

The Stricken Deer 264

had vanished, he kept a sort of blind, instinctive faith
in her. Now at a time when his health was beginning
to fail, she was suddenly Stricken with a mortal illness,
and soon she needed support as much as he did. His
only defence was gone; though he might Still Struggle,
the battle was decided.

Of course if he had left her and made his home
with other people in another place who knows that
he might not have managed to Stave off the evil day
indefinitely ? But even had such a course of adtion
entered his head, his whole nature would have risen
up to repudiate it. How often had she Stood by him
during his illnesses; and how patiently, how self-
sacrificingly had she done it! Was,it not her care
for him, indeed, that had brought her to her present
case } Now it was his turn to help her. And if to
do so were to risk his life, it would only be a small
recompense for what he owed her. But it needed
no obligation of gratitude or loyalty to keep him at
her side. Every other consideration was swallowed
up in the great tide of compassion which welled up in
him at the sight of her afflidfion. Mary, his Mary
was suffering: his only thought was to relieve her.
And recklessly, unhesitatingly he poured out any
drop of vitality that remained to him in order to do
it. By the inscrutable decrees that govern mortal
de^iny, his devotion was his de^lrudtion. There can
be no doubt that it was the ftrain of nursing her that
finally confirmed his doom.

It was no longer possible even for a moment to
preserve that precarious balance which by desperate
efforts Cowper had managed for the lail three years to
maintain between sense and madness. His incongruous
double life was at an end. From now on, inexorably,
unfalteringly, night began to gain on day, the world of
sense to be obscured by the world of vision. Already

265 Lije of Cowper

in the early summer, the time of year when he was
usually safe from worry, his sleep had been disturbed
by nightmares, fearful phantoms of death, carcases and
churchyards; and, more dangerous, he had once
more begun to hear spirit voices. While at Eartham
he had experienced those fits of depression when he
woke in the morning, that had tormented him in
1763. These, however, were only intermittent mutter-
ings of the oncoming ftorm. When he got back to
Weston it broke in good earned. The particular
circumftances of his life there were, indeed, the very
woril for him in every possible way. For one thing,
he was so much alone. Now that Mary could not
be a companion to him he was in.double need of
visitors. And no one came to ^lay in the house for
months; so that there were hours in the day when
he had nothing to take his mind off its own thoughts.
Then again it was autumn, and to anyone with Cowper’s
sensibility to environment every shortening day, every
sallowing leaf, spoke ominously of mortality. He
was conscious, too, that after autumn would come
winter, fatal period; and his spirits grew heavy with
melancholy anticipation.

Nor could he, as in earlier years, ^ave off his
depression by working. In the middle of the morn¬
ing he was always with Mary; and as she was not
able to use her hands, he did not like to use his in
front of her, for fear of making her more painfully
conscious of her infirmity. So that he had only time
to write if he began by candlelight, at six or seven in
the morning. Besides, the work he had on hand
happened, moil unluckily, to be a commentary on
the firft books of “ Paradise Lo^.” And as these
were all about hell and its fires, they tended rather
to deepen than to dissipate his depression.

But, anyway, even if he had enjoyed his work, and

The Stricken Deer

266

even if he had been able to give more time to it, it
would have made no difference. For he was too
tired to do it. Time and again he would get out pen
and paper and sit down at his table, and then an hour
later get up without having written a word. The
exertion of the earlier part of the year, the strain of
nursing, the violent alteration in his ordinary routine
and the con^ant anxiety, had been too much for his
already failing constitution. And now he simply had
not got the physical Strength to make the effort of
concentration needed for his work. On his general
morale his exertions had not proved less disastrous.
He had tried so hard and with so little effedt that
now he felt helpless and without hope. The visit to
Eartham had given him especial cause for dejection.
He had hoped so much from it: and not only for
Mary. Buoyed up by the excitement of the Struggle,
half-formed hopes regarding his own disorders had
begun to Stir within him. If Heaven were inter¬
vening through the means of Hayley to save Mary,
might it not also save him Besides, supposing there
was something in what people had always said to
him, and that his own sufferings were, in part at leaSt,
the result of physical causes. Then the change might
alleviate them. It was a faint hope, and he hardly
admitted its existence even to himself: but he could
not banish it from his mind. It proved as vain as
his hopes for Mary. And the fait that he had hoped
now added all the pangs of disappointment to his
usual depression. Here was only another proof, so
he told himself, that his troubles were incurable and
he muSt carry them to the end.

Solitude, idleness, exhaustion, disappointment, and
the time of year—all the circum^ances of his situation
had combined againSt him. It was no wonder that
he took a rapid turn for the worse. A persistent

267 Lije oj Cowper

depression took possession of his spirits, a depression
which gradually identified itself with two subjcfts.
One was, of course, his old fear of Mary’s death.
Now that he had acknowledged to himself that she
would not get well, he felt she might die at any moment.
And he was proportionately agitated. His other fear
came from his inability to finish Milton. The task
had been commanded by God; and now God had
rendered him incapable of carrying it out. What
could this portendWas God once more forcing
him to commit a sin in order to damn him for it
Convinced as he was of his damnation, this new proof
of it sent a thrill of horror through him. Again and
again in desperation he nerved himself to make
another attempt to get it done. And with each suc¬
cessive failure suspense gnawed more cruelly at his
heart. They were terrible days. Hour after hour
he would sit silent, with Mary silent on the other side
of the fireplace, brooding on his fears till they obscured
his whole horizon. And the nights were worse than
the days. No longer did nights of terror come
spasmodically and far between, infrequent black
patches on the pleasant-coloured surface of his exig¬
ence. There was hardly an evening now when his
candle did not light him up that quiet staircase
into hell, hardly a night when he did not close
his eyes to be haunted by horrible visions. In
fitful, incoherent parable, they mocked the fears
that tormented his waking hours. That destroying
fire which is the symbol of damnation flared luridly
through his dreams. “ Friday, Nov. 16th. . . .
Dreamt that in a Slate of the moSl insupportable
misery, I looked through the window of a Strange
room, being all alone, and saw preparations being
made for my execution. That it was about four days
distant and that then I was deStined to suffer ever-

The Stricken Deer

268

ladling martyrdom in the' fire, my body being prepared
for the purpose and my dissolution made a thing
impossible. Rose overwhelmed with infinite despair,
and came down into the ^ludy, execrating the day I
was born with inexpressible bitterness.” Another
time he dreamt that he was in his own room waiting
to be led out and burnt alive. Seized with a desire
to carry some remembrance with him, he picked up
a piece of the door plate. A Grange and horrible
thought struck him. The fragment he held was of
metal and, growing red hot in the fire, would only
exacerbate his agony. Once again, cold with horror,
he awoke. But waking was as bad as sleeping. For
then the voices would begin. He heard them almo^
every night now. Generally their purport was hostile,
to warn him of Mary’s death or his own damnation.
But they clothed themselves in some short sentence,
often a saying he had heard or a quotation. Once,
for instance, he heard the words: “ The wonted roar
is up among the woods.” It was a line from Corpus,
and no doubt it ftuck in his head when he was working
on Milton. But it was fraught with a new signific¬
ance. The picture it conjured up before his inward
eye was of no florid Comus rout, but of wrath and
supernatural danger, a demon-hunt rather, of German
legend, Walpurgis rider and baying hell-hound afoot
after his soul. It was as if his obsessed mind involun¬
tarily twilled any bit of experience present or remem¬
bered into a reference to the subjeft of his obsession.
After the voices came a fit of dejeftion which lailed
all the morning. Only in the afternoon did the
peaceful daily life round him penetrate his spirit
sufficiently to lift it to a liftless torpor. And soon
night would come; and with night the fearful cycle
be^n again.

The ftrain of such an exiftence was more than

269 Lije oj Cowper

Cowper could bear. And, in a paroxysm of misery,
he would at times curse the God that had made him.
But a moment later he would realize that by the
curse he had added one more to the tale of sins that
were leading him to damnation. Beside himself with
misery, once more he cursed God, to be ^ricken once
more with an intolerable remorse. Caught in a
vicious circle, his horror of damnation seemed only to
make that damnation more certain.

But though the battle was irretrievably loft, he
could not even now give up the fight. In the recesses
of his being a laft spark of his marvellous vitality ftill
flickered. And with the desperate energy of a man
snatching at his only remaining chance of life, he
rallied in a final superhuman eflFort to achieve that
faith which alone, in his view, could save him. He
knew, none better, what it felt like to have it. To
revive this paleft glow of that feeling—this, and this
alone, was the objeft of his every thought. He knew
of only one man who could help him to it. With
abjeft, hungry hope, he turned anew to Teedon.
To Cowper’s yearning eyes he shone out—poor, fussy,
seedy Teedon—aureoled in all the glory of an angel
of salvation. He was pleased to find himself in this
splendid and unaccuftomed r 61 e, as who would not
be ? And he threw himself into it with a will. He
prayed for Cowper assiduously, and generally with
moft favourable results. A comforting message would
be revealed to him; at once he would come hurrying
over to Wefton to deliver it. He also gave Cowper
advice as to how to ftimulate his faith. Let him say
one colleft over and over again ; if that had no effeft,
let him paraphrase it and say it once more. He,
Teedon, had often tried both methods, and found
them moft helpful in inducing spiritual emotions.
With a pathetic docility, Cowper accepted the messages

The Stricken Deer

270

and set himself to follow the advice. At firft both
did him good. He slept more calmly; and at
moments, notably when he was walking in the fading
autumnal garden, he was visited by a faint gleam of
religious emotion. But these hopeful signs were not
fulfilled. The gleams vanished, not to return, and
his sleep began to be disturbed once more. Nor did
Teedon s subsecjuent messages and advice repeat the
good cffeft of his initial ones. How, indeed, should
they ? Teedon had not the slighted underftanding
of the nature of Cowper’s malady, and so could not
attempt to cure it. His methods and messages by
their novelty had managed to revive the feeble remain¬
ing glimmer of Cowper^s capacity for religious feeling.
When, however, he grew accuftomed to them, they
produced as little effedl on hirh as reading the Bible
or going to church. And the consequent disappoint¬
ment after hope now added to his dejeftion, juft as
his disappointment after his visit to Eartham had. A
revulsion againft Teedon and his advice took posses¬
sion of him, which grew until, as usual, it found
expression in his dreams. In February 1793 he
dreamt God had declared to him that all the encourage¬
ment He had given him through Teedon had been
meant in mockery. It was the end of Cowper’s
conneftion with Teedon. He continued his pension :
and if Teedon wrote to him, answered politely in
order not to hurt his feelings. But he looked for
help to him no longer.

His laft hope had failed him. And now at length
he resigned himself to disafter. Disappointment had
quenched that laft spark of vitality: he could hght
ho more. He grew worse rapidly. As his despair
grew wilder, his anxiety about Mary and Milton gave
place to more immediate and sensational terrors. He
became convinced that some fearful disafter was going

zyi Lije oj Cowper

to overtake him at once. It was not hard to fancy
what form it might take. He dreamt one night that
he asked a dodor for a remedy again^ madness.
The doftor replied he knew a sure one, death. Death
or madness—these were the two alternatives that faced
Cowper; and daily he waited for one to strike him
down. Spring was coming on, and in the ordinary
way he would have felt safe till the following winter.
But it is the measure of his decline that spring no longer
Sl:irred any response in him. The trees might grow
green in We^lon Park, the birds twitter along the
alleys of the Wilderness ; he heeded them as little as
the drizzling rains of November. The darkness that
swallowed in turn his hope and his resistance had
now come between him and the visible world he had
loved so long.

Meanwhile he had more mundane troubles to con¬
tend with. Mary was growing Steadily worse. When
they had got back from Eartham she had Still been
able, after a fashion, to walk and talk and take an
interest in what was happening round her. Now she
could hardly see; her conversation was an incoherent
mumble ; and it was with infinite difficulty, at a snail’s
pace, that she could drag herself round the garden
with two people supporting her. The change in her
spirits was even more marked. Nine months ago,
hopeless though she muSt have known her case to be,
she had Still managed to keep up a gallant pretence
that she was getting better. “ She always tells me
so,” said Cowper tenderly, “ and will probably die
with the words on her lips.” And when he had
come into her room, wild-eyed, from some awful
nightmare, she would notice and Strive to Stammer
out some sentences of comfort. Pathetically, indeed,
the two old friends had sought to bear one another’s
burdens, he to ease her body, she to soothe his mind.

The Stricken Deer 272

Now all that was over. She was far too infirm to
notice much about Cowper or anyone else; while
under the pressure of disease and of the enforced
idleness, so intolerable to one whose life had been
exclusively devoted to practical things, even her iron
self-control had begun to give way. She rose, hardly
knowing how she would drag through the day, sat
sunk in a gloomy lethargy longing for it to end, and
from time to time broke out in vain lament.

Living with her muft have been a terrible ftrain,
especially to one in Cowper’s condition. But he allowed
no sign that he was conscious of this to escape him.
Deathly ill, his every night an ordeal of unspeakable
horror, expedant every moment of final catadrophe,
he continued to nurse her, to feed her, to read to her,
to comfort her. Nor did he for an indant relax his
care, lose patience, utter a word of complaint. Even
a thought of it, indeed, he would have suppressed as
a disloyalty. If her illness had changed her, that
only added fuel to the flame of pity which consumed
him. What mud she have gone through that she
should succumb 1 His consciousness of the change
showed, if at all, in an added assiduity of tenderness.'
Only once, as he looked back down the years of their
friendship and thought of what had been and what
now was, his full heart overflowed in a drain of
mournful pathos.

“ The twentieth year is well-nigh paft
Since firft our sky was overcall;

Ah, would that this might be the lall,
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,

I see thee daily weaker grow—

HTwas my dillrcss that brought thee low.
My Mary!

273

Lije oj Cowper

Thy needles, once a shining Aore,

For my sake reAless heretofore,

Now vid disus'd and shine no more,

My Mary!

For though thou gladly wouldil fulfil
The same kind office for me flill,

Thy sight now seconds not thy will.

My Mary!

But well thou play’d’ft the housewife’s part,
And all thy threads with magic art
Have wound themselves about this heart,
My Mary I

Thy indiflind^ expressions seem
Like language uttered in a dream;

Yet me they charm, whate’er the theme,
My Mary I

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright.

Are ftill more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of glorious light,

My Mary 1

For could I view nor them nor thee.

What sight worth seeing could I see ?

The sun would rise in vain for me,

My Mary I

Partakers of thy sad decline.

Thy hands their little force resign;

Yet, gently preil, press gently mine,

My Mary!

And then I feel that Aill I hold
A richer (tort ten thousandfold
Than misers fancy in their gold.

My Mary I

Such feebleneM of limb thou proViV,

That now at every ftep thou mov’ft,

Upheld by two; yet ftill thou lov’ft,

My Mary I

T

The Stricken Deer

274

And £lill to love, though preil with ill,

In wintry age to feel no chill.

With me.is to be lovely ftill,

My Mary!

But ah I by conflant heed I know.

How oft the sadness that I show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe.

My Mary!

And should my future lot be caA
With much resemblance of the paA,

Thy worn-out heart will break at laA,

My Mary! ”

Once Cowper was strong and happy and brilliant:
now he was sick and miserable and crazy. But his
devotion to Mary makes it perhaps the crowning
moment of his life.

Mary’s decline could not fail to hasten Cowper’s.
Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1793,
helped by a visit from Hayley, he managed to main¬
tain his existing condition. But with November
events began to rush headlong to the final catastrophe.
Swiftly the darkness began to eat up such shreds as
remained of the world of daylight. The nights
became even more terrible than those of laSl year.
Higher blazed the phantom fires of torment, fiercer
and more insistent clamoured the ghoStly voices.
And now their activities were not confined to the
night. Out of the solitary bedchamber where they
had lurked so long the demons of his terror began
to creep: Stealthily they descended the Stairs, and
took possession of the world of day below. And
soon there was no place, no time of day when he was
safe from their attack. At meals, on walks, working
in his room, he heard their voices; sitting with Mary
by the fireside, suddenly they would Steal into his
tnoughts and clutch with icy hand at his heart. And,

275 Ltje oj Cowper

as the world of spirit grew more present, so the world
of matter grew more insub Aantial. He could scarcely
see his ordinary surroundings in the infernal light
which now quivered round his every ifep: the sounds
of daily life grew thin and inaudible beside the super¬
natural wailings that dinned incessantly in his ears.
As for the world outside his immediate experience, it
had loft all significance for him whatever. It was
1793 ; and every day the newspaper was full of the
terrific events of the Terror in France. But though
Cowper read of them he could not mufter up the
slighteft feeling of revulsion or pity. Indeed, all the
bloodshed of the guillotine might well seem trivial
to him beside the nameless and ftupendous spiritual
horrors which were now the habitual element of his
thoughts.

In January 1794—once more January—his suffer¬
ings came to their crisis. He had never loft his sense
that a cataftrophe was impending over him. But as
the world of flesh gave place to the world of spirit,,
once again the objeft of his terror changed. Madness
and death were earthly ills, and as such the prospeft
of them no longer alarmed him. In their ftead a
new and appalling idea presented itself to his imagina¬
tion. He began to wonder if death, so far from
being a disafter, was not to be the laft mercy denied
him by a wrathful God. Could it be that the super¬
natural visitations which had pursued him during the
laft month were only the precursors of a more formid¬
able attack, and that the demons of hell were going
to carry him off like Fauftus, while he was yet alive ?
In his shattered nervous ftate, the sheer horror of
the idea was enough to make it irresiftibly convincing
to him. With the conviftion his remaining veftiges
of sanity forsook him. His dual exiftence was finally
at an end. The laft ftreaks of normal daylight had

The Stricken Deer 276

vanished from his mental horizon; and nightmare
darkness held dominion over all.

It was never to lift again. For the laft time his
lifelong enemies had gathered to the attack; for the
laft time they had overwhelmed him. His body
lived on for six years more, but his spirit inhabited
another world. We^lon, familiar Weilon, was become
to him only a fragment of space beleaguered amid the
wa^es of primal darkness, where the fiends howled
and beat their wings and gnashed their teeth, greedy
to snatch their prey. If his old friends came to see
him, he shrank from them. What were they doing
far away from the old homely earth ? MoA likely it
was not them at all, but devila again, cunningly dis¬
guised in the shape of those he loved, to entrap him.
The devils were coming to seize him: amid the
confused cloud of fear and misery in which his brain
now reeled that was the one fa£I that ^ood out with
a dreadful, persi^ent clarity. Not for a day, nor for
an hour, not for a minute during six long years did
he forget it 1 Not a day, not an hour, not a minute
passed which he did not confidently believe to be his
laA in the world. Sometimes he would make wild
attempts to circumvent his enemies; refuse to leave
his room le^ they should take possession of it, and
he should find them there, ready to leap on him at
his return. At other times, in a desperate effort to
obtain redemption, he would impose Grange penances
on himself: sit for long periods without moving,
refuse to eat for days together. But generally he
ju^ waited. Rigid with fear, his breath coming in
short gasps, his eyes keen to discern any oncoming
shadow, ears agog to hear any approaching ruille, he
would iland for hours; then, unable to contain him¬
self, he would pace the room like a ca^ed tiger; then
sink into a chair inarticulately moaning, or perhaps

277 Cowper

rush to the writing-table and unburden himself in a
torrent of words. “ I cannot bear the leaft part of
what is coming upon me,” he scrawls in 1794, “ yet
am forced to meet it with eyes open wide, to see it
approach and deilitute of all means to escape it.”
Passionately he protects againft the cruelty of his
deftiny, rehearses the long tale of Heaven’s injustice
to him, and at length relapses into a fatali^ic dejec¬
tion. “ I was a poor fly entangled in a thousand
webs from the beginning. . . . My despair is infinite,
my entanglements infinite, my doom is sure.” And
finally, his feeling once more rising, in a ilrain of
tragic eloquence he bids a laif farewell to the God
who has so strangely recompensed his devotion.
“ Farewell to the remembrance of Thee forever—I
rnuil now suffer Thy wrath, but forget that I ever
heard Thy name. Oh, horrible! and ^lill more
horrible that I write these la^f lines with a hand that
is not permitted to tremble.”

One would have thought that Cowper’s sufferings
had reached their zenith. What, indeed, was there
left for human being to suffer more ? But a final
horror was yet to be added to his exigence. In April
of 1794 Mary had another ftroke. Once again she
rallied from it; but this time it had touched her
brain, and when she rose from her bed it was per¬
ceived that her personality had undergone a terrible
change. The old Mary, iloical and selfless, with her
calm eyes and quiet ways, was gone, and instead,
hideously travelled in her shape, though with face
distorted by disease, ftood another woman: selfish,
querulous, suspicious and exa(^ing. To that same
Gowper to whom she had dedicated her whole life
she was now a peevish tyrant; never let him leave
her for a moment, forced him, weak as he was, to
drag her for hours round the garden. The little

The Stricken Deer

278

house, which she had managed to inve^ with an
atmosphere that, even at its saddest, was sober and
dignified, now echoed with sordid scenes of her own
making. Losing all control, in mowing imbecile
fury she would scream out that Cowper’s relations
and friends were plotting againA her, that they were
taking him away, that they had designs on her property,
even that she had caught them trying to get possession
of her silver. It was the laft drop in the cup of
Cowper’s anguish. To lose the support of his good
angel had been sorrowful indeed; but to see her
degraded into something physically and mentally
repulsive was ten thousand times more painful.
Even now he was always gentle to her, submissively
obeyed her moft unreasonable demand. Sometimes he
thought that she, like his visitors, was really a demon
in disguise. For once this delusion may have been
less unbearable than the truth.

Indeed, the change in Mary makes life at Wellon
during these years too painful to contemplate. No
ilory, however tragic, is wholly depressing in which
the virtue of the charafters is untouched by what
happens to them. There is even something exalting
and consoling in the speftacle of human integrity
triumphing over adverse circumstances. But that
this integrity can fail, and through no aft of conscious
human will, but irresistibly impelled by physical
causes. Strikes at the root of any confidence one may
hold in existence.

But even this, the blackeSt period as it was of all
Cowper’s Story, is relieved by a ray of light, the
devotion of his friends. Round the sombre pyre of
his simreme agony hover the figures of Hayley,
John Johnson, and Lady Hesketh. There is some¬
thing comic about them. They are so wonderfully
unsuited to understand, let alone alleviate the psycho-

279 Cowper

logical intricacies of Gjwper’s disease: their busy,
mundane silhouettes Aand out in such incongruous
contrail to the apocalyptic flame and dark of their
background. But there is nothing comic about their
love. During one time or another of the next seven
years each shows himself prepared to subvert the
whole order of his life in order to relieve Cowper’s
affli^lion. It was a credit to them; but it was also
a credit to him. That a normal, conventional, pros¬
perous Georgian lady like Harriet Hesketh, and a
normal, conventional, prosperous Georgian divine like
John Johnson should have been willing to give up a
considerable part of their lives to him is the moft
ftriking testimony possible to the extraordinary beauty
and charm of Cowper’s charafter.

It is not so odd that Hay ley should, for he was
prone to fits of unbalanced enthusiasm. Nor, as it
turned out, was he called upon to sacrifice so much
as the other two. But the circumstances of his life
at this time made it extremely good of him to exert
himself on Cowper’s behalf as much as he did. For
his domestic difficulties had begun again. The
Pitiable Eliza had deserted her respeftable friends in
Derby and established herself in London, where she
filled the ears of all and sundry with complaints
of the inadequate financial provision which, she
asserted, Hayley made for her. Such accusations were
peculiarly distressing to a man of his sensibility,
especially as he was now, as ever, very hard up. How¬
ever, when in the spring of 1794 he heard or Cowper’s
collapse, all his personal worries were forgotten, and
travelling, with characteristic disregard of convention,
alone with his housemaid, he hurried over to WeSton
to see if he could be of any help. With admirable
ardour and patience, he sought to comfort Cowper
and to reawaken his interest in Milton. His efforts

The Stricken Deer 280

were vain. But in administering to Cowpcr’s material
wants he met with more success.

Two years before Hayley had been profoundly
shocked to find that Cowpcr was in financial Straits.
Surely, he thought, a man of genius who had benefited
mankind ought to be supported by a grateful country.
With him to think was to aft; and early in 1792 he
had immediately set to work to procure Cowper a
pension. At firSt it seemed likely that his attempt
would share the fate of moSl of his other schemes. For,
as usual, the almoSl supernatural indefatigability with
which he pursued his end was only equalled by the
eccentricity of the means by which he sought to achieve
it. At a critical period of English hiSlory he thruSt
himself upon eminent Statesmen whom he hardly
knew, harangued them for hours in a high-flown Style,
and when he could not see them bombarded them
with letters both in prose and verse. The firSt man
he applied to was Cowper’s- old friend, Thurlow.
He hftened to Hayley in silence, then ushered him
out, earnestly assuring him he would do everything
he could. Two years passed, and nothing happened;
though Hayley had reminded Thurlow in a series
of lyrics increasingly severe in tone. He there¬
fore turned to Pitt himself, and set out Cowper’s
situation to him in a long and eloquent letter, culmin¬
ating in a sonnet. What was his norror to receive the
letter back unopened. With great difficulty he pro¬
cured an interview with him, and one morning, in
June 1793, fortified by port wine, he arrived at
Downing Street and pourea out his ftory in a speech
even longer and more eloquent than usual. The
effeft was the same as it had been on Thurlow. HaSlily
and earnestly Pitt ushered him out, assuring him that
he would do what he could. “ In a tumult of sensi¬
bility ” Hayley kissed his hand and burSt into tears.

281 Lije of Cofwper

The game seemed won. But once again the months
passed and nothing further happened. Hayley was
dismayed but he was undefeated. He managed to
enlift a new and powerful advocate, Lord Spencer, to
assi^ him, and himself mu^ering all his literary
powers, composed a letter to Pitt which should compel
him for very shame to recolleft his obligations.

“ It is not often,” it began, “ that a Hermit can be
deceived by a Prime Miniver; yet I am an example
that such an extraordinary incident may happen.”
Vigorously it rehearsed the details of Pitt’s perfidy:
and then, “ I write in the frank and proud sorrow of a
wounded spirit,” it concluded, “ with a cordial and
affedlionate wish that Heaven may bless you with
unthwarted power to do good and with virtue sufficient
to exert it. I retain a lading sense of the very
engaging kindness with which you allowed me to
pour forth my heart to you on this interesting subject,
and I am moSl sincerely, my dear sir, your grateful
though afflided servant, W. Hayley.” Alas I the hearts
of Prime Ministers grow hard to resiSt even darts such
as these: yet once more Pitt did not reply. Hayley’s
hopes at laSt began to flag. But meanwhile Lord
Spencer had been busy, and in March 1794, news
came to WeSton that his good offices had procured
Cowper a pension of ,^300 a year. By Hayley’s efforts
Cowper was relieved from material difficulties for the
reSt of his life.

Lady Hesketh’s was a harder task. She was at
WeSton at the time of Cowper’s final collapse. Over¬
come with anxiety, she suggested he should go to a
home kept by Dr. Willis, the moSt famous mental
doctor or the day. Surely the man who had cured
” the dear excdlent King ’ was likely to benefit her
poor cousin. If there was a difficulty about the
expense, she would make that all right. But Mary

The Stricken Deer

282

in her present ftate of mind would not hear of Cowper
going away. The “ enchantress,” as Lady Hesketh
now bitterly called her, said that if the Archangel
Gabriel were to persuade her to let him leave her,
she would not comply. Clearly, however, it was
impossible to leave him without care. So, without
hesitation, at the age of sixty. Lady Hesketh left her
comfortable, cheerful home in London and settled in
the depths of the country to take the solitary charge of
two lunatics. It was not an easy life for her. She
tried to occupy Cowper by teaching him netting and
mat-making, and she read aloud to him. But he was
liable to think anything done for him was meant as
an injury, and any kind word concealed an insult:
suddenly when she was reading aloud he would leap
up in a fit of passion and rush from the room. She
had never been one to conceal her feelings, nor did
she now. The poft brought John Johnson page
after page of lamentations over “ the poor dear soul,
my cousin,” intermingled with denunciations of
the “ enchantress.” But her old vigour of spirit
never deserted her, and though she complained,
she never gave in. With the consequence that at
the end of two years her health was seriously
impaired.

This presented a problem. Bereft of Lady Hesketh
and unable to go to Dr. Willis, what was to happen to
Cowper ? At this junfture it was the turn or John
Johnson to throw himself into the breach as unhesi¬
tatingly as Lady Hesketh had done. Of course,
Cowper muft come and live with him. He could
imagine no greater pleasure and privilege than to
look after his dear bard, and Mary too. It was true
that his house was small, but he wis sure he could
manage to get them in.

” As for ourselves, my love,” he wrote to the

283 Life of Covoper

unfortunate siller who kept house for him, “ I know
you will have no objeftion to the garrets.”

We do not know how she received this proposal;
but his other relations protected with a growing
acrimony again^ the burden he had so quixotically
shouldered. However, he paid no attention, and
in July 1795 Cowper and Mary to Norfolk.

Nor were they parted from him till death. He
looked after Cowper with unremitting, solicitous
affedfion, gave up his curacy at East Dereham,
and moved his house from place to place in the
neighbourhood, from village to open country, from
open country to the seaside, trying to find somewhere
that seemed likely to help his recovery.

But Cowper, far sequestered in his nightmare
world, was impervious to his surroundings. How
could any variation in that infinitesimal piece of
matter called the earth make any difference to one
who expected to be flung at any moment into bottom¬
less abysses of perdition ? As a matter of fa£t, a few
days before he left WeSlon, when he was taking a laSl
look from the window of his room at his beloved
garden, he was visited by a moment of emotion.
His departure from the home of so many memories
seemed the symbol and confirmation of that more
irrevocable departure from the world of ordinary'
human hopes and fears. As with a gesture of vale¬
diction he wrote on the window shutter:

** Farewell, dear scenes forever closed to me,

Oh, for what sorrows mull I now exchange thee I
Me miserable ! How should I escape
Infinite wrath and infinite despair,

Whom death, earth, heaven and hell consigned to ruin
Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me ? ”

But this impulse of feeling soon passed. Throughout
the long journey to Norfolk and those shorter journeys

The Stricken Deer

284

that succeeded it, Cowper followed Johnson as docile
and oblivious to all around him as a blind, deaf mute.
The sudden change from sheltered Buckinghamshire
to the skiey levels of Norfolk, the return to a di^lrifl:
poignant with memories of childhood, into what a
tumult of feeling would two such events have ca^ him
in the days of his sanity! But now he could only be
roused by some faft relating to his present condition.
In his aunt Bodham’s house at Mattishall he caught
sight of a portrait of himself painted in former days.
The contrail between the mood in which he remem¬
bered to have sat for the pifture and that which now
possessed him sent a twinge of horror through him.

“ Oh,” he broke out, clasping his hands in hope¬
less yearning, “ if I could be as I was then.”

As for the scenery, it did not ftir the slighteil
response in him any more. Only the sea had not
loil all its power. As he wandered on the ^retching
sands, his ears filled by the monotonous thunder of
the breakers, his anguish was lulled as it had been
at Brighton and Southampton years ago. But even
this solace was reft from him. Brooding incessantly,
as he did, on the subject of his torments, one day the
idea flashed into his mind that Providence had brought
him there in order the better to fulfil its awful purpose;
and that over the limitless ocean, sailing from no one
knew where, a phantom ship manned with demons
might bear down on him as he was pacing the sands
and carry hijn off. From that moment with Glaring
eyes and trembling limbs he scanned the horizon for
a sail.

For his fears dominated him, if possible, even
more than at Weilon. Sometimes he would welcome
Johnson in the morning with a loving look; but as
often with gloomy, terrified eyes, for he thought him
an evil apparition. And every brief note he scribbled

285 Lije oj Cowper

at this time contained a sentence to say that these
were the laft words fate was ever going to let him
write. The feeling of foreboding about his journey
which he had experienced that morning in his bed¬
room at Weilon tiarned out to be in a sense ju^ified.
His spirit had long ago taken leave of its surround¬
ings. But with his departure from his old home the
lalt worn threads that had bound him even in memory
or by association to the world of his sanity snapped;
and the unfamiliar background known only in madness
tended to confirm his confused mind in the impression
that his old life was completely vanished. He felt
Heaven had transferred him to a strange and remote
place, there to infill on him his supreme ordeal; and
such shreds of his old self that might ^ill adhere to him
slipped off. Even to look at, lean, livid and distraught,
he was hardly recognizable as the plump, placid Cowper
of a few years back. And the few letters he wrote
after he got to Norfolk read like the letters of another
man. For one thing, the handwriting, small, deliberate
and shaky, is different; but more Startlingly different
is the Style. It is not imbecile or degraded: not at
the height of his delusions were the processes of
Cowper^s brain impaired. But he writes no longer
in the easy, flexible prose of his prime, or even in the
Hebraic phraseology of his Evangelical phase, but
in a new Style, n^ed, throbbing, orchestral, falling
in lamenting cadence like the cry of the gulls that
swooped round the Norfolk cliffs.

“ Adieu,” he concludes a letter to Lady Hesketh,
“ I shall write to you no more. I am promised
months of continuance here, and should be some¬
what less of a wretch in my present feeling could I
credit the promise. But ene^ive care is taken that
I should not. The night contradicts the day, and
I go down the torrent of time into the gulf that 1

The Stricken Deer

286

have expefted to plunge into so long. A few hours
remain, but among them not one that I should ever
occupy in writing to you again. Once more, there¬
fore, adieu—and adieu to the pen forever. I suppress
ten thousand agonies to add only William Cowper.”

Yet changed though he was, he was not yet wholly
unrecognizable. All the madness in the world could
not root out the love and constancy which were the
ftrongeil qualities in his nature. Sunk in despair,
he could never forget where he had once loved; cut
off as he felt himself by an immeasurable gulf from
his old life, ^lill at times memories would stir in his
breach and he would caft a longing, lingering look
behind to Wellon and all he had loved there.

“ I shall never see Wefton more,” he wrote;
” there indeed I lived a life of infinite despair . . .
but to have passed there the little time that remained
to me was the desire of my heart.”

In a pathetic letter he besought the clergyman
for news. “ Gratify me with news of We^on,” it
begins, and finally, after many inquiries, “ tell me if
my poor birds are ^lill living. I never see the herbs
I used to give them without a recolleftion of them;
and sometimes I am ready to gather them, forgetting
I am not at home.” Nor, confident though he was
that his time on earth was short, did he cease from
attaching himself to those around him. He grew
very fond of a Miss Perowne, whom Johnny got to
take care of him, while to Johnny himself he clung
with a wild intensity of devotion. He would be iU
with agitation for a whole day before Johnny went
on a journey; and if he went away on Sundays, as
he sometimes did, to take the service somewhere in
the neighbourhood, Cowper used to ftand in the
evening, a Lent, wiftful figure at the garden gate,
driving to catch the barking of a dog at a cottage

287 Ltje oj Cowper

further along the road which he knew betokened
his return.

So passed a year and a half; and in 1796, since
change of scene seemed to do Cowper no good,
Johnny settled permanently at East Dereham in a
house overlooking the market place. Not that he
had given up hope concerning Cowper’s recovery,
nor had Hayley or Lady Hesketh. Absent from
Cowper, they continued to think of him much as
ever; were always writing letters, in Hayley’s case
varied by sonnets, demanding news and expressing
hope. The trio of Cowper’s adive friends was now
become a quartette by the addition of the conscientious
Rose; he was found useful since he lived in London
for the purpose of extrading Cowper’s pension from a
dilatory exchequer. Shy and awkward, he was not
naturally fitted for such a task.

“ With all the little Rose’s Sense, Genius and
Learning" declared Lady Hesketh on one occasion,
“ he was quite at a StandHill in a very plain, simple
affair and had not that bold, courageous animal, l.ady
Hesketh, made a Row about the matter ... we
might all have gone a-begging together.”

Her adivities on Cowper’s behalf were not con¬
fined to harrying Rose. She also recommended
remedies. They were of a simple kind. Redored
as she now was to a normal life, she had returned to
her normal frame of mind; which was not one apprecia¬
tive of the myderie^'of lunatic psychology. And she
tended to think Cowper’s a physical disorder arising,
she ingeniously suggeded, from checked perspiration.
Let him, therefore, try warm bathing, or, if that was
not possible, eat peaches, figs, sago and large quantities
of ass’s milk. In the flood tide of her readion from
the gloom of Wedon, she began to think that such a
diet, considently adhered to, might very likely cure

The Stricken Deer

288

him completely. Indeed, her chief anxiety on his
behalf did not relate to his illness. The French war
was at this time raging, and L|dy Hesketh wondered
if Norfolk was safe. It was so near to France that
it mi^ht well prove to be the landing-place of an
invading army; could not Johnny move Cowper
inland At any rate let him collect as much gold
as possible. She did not truft this new-fangled
paper money: one could not be sure that the French,
so diabolically cunning to ruin hone^ English people,
might not by some despicable trick render it value¬
less at any moment. In 1798 news that the French
army was safely involved in the Egyptian campaign
raised her spirits. “Don’t you long to be certain
that the dear Arabs have swallowed Bonaparte and
made mincemeat of his army ? ” she exclaimed in an
ec^asy of patriotic fervour.

Hayley was also optimistic about Cowper's illness,
and he also had his remedies. But they, as might
have been expected, were of a more sensational kind.
Indeed, a scheme he originated in 1797 provides the
one melancholy gleam of comedy that lightens the
blackness of Cowper’s laSl years. On June 20th he
received a letter from Cowper, the firSl he had written
to him since he had left WeSlon. It was in his
customary Strain, and the benevolent Hayley, horrified
by the condition it betrayed, set to work with even
more than his usual ardour to devise some method
of relievin|[ it. The result of his^ frenzied cogitations
expressed itself in a letter to Cowper, the moSt extra¬
ordinary composition that even Hayley ever made
accessible to an aSIonished world.

“ My very dear dejedled friend,’’ it began, “ the few
lines in your hand, so often welcome to me and now
so long wished for, afiPe£ted me through my heart
and soul both with joy and grief, joy that you are

289 Lije oj Cowper

again able to write to me, and grief that you write
under the oppression of melancholy.

My keen sensations in perusing these heart¬
piercing lines have been a painful prelude to the
following ec^latic vision: I beheld the throne of
God, whose splendour, though in excess, did not
ftrike me blind, but left me power to discern on the
^leps of it two kneeling, angelic forms. A kind
seraph seemed to whisper to me that these heavenly
petitioners were your lovely mother and my own.
... I sprang eagerly forward to enquire your deftiny
of your mother. Turning towards me with a look
of seraphic benignity, she smiled upon me and said:

‘ Warmest of earthly friends! Moderate the anxiety
of thy zeal, left it diftraft thy declining faculties, and
know that as a reward for thy kindness my son shall
be reftored to himself and to friendship. But the
All-merciful and Almighty ordains that his reftoration
shall be gradual, and that his peace with Heaven shall
be preceded by the following extraordinary circum-
ftances of signal honour on earth. He shall receive
letters from members of parliament, from judges and
from bishops to thank him for the service he has
rendered to the Chriftian world by his devotional
poetry. These shall be followed by a letter from the
jPrime Minifter to the same eflfeft ; and this by thanks
expressed to him on the same account in the hand of
the King himself. . . . Haften to impart these blessed
tidings to your favourite friend,* said the Maternal
Spirit, * and let your thanksgiving to God be an in¬
crease of reciprocal kindness to each other.

I obey the vision, my dear Cowper, with a degree
of trembling fear that it may be only the fruitless
offspring of my agitated fancy. But if any part of
the prophecy shall soon be accomplished, a faint ray
of hope will then be turned into ftrong, luminous

u

The Stricken Deer

290

and delightful conviftion in my heart, and I truft in
j^ours, my dear delivered sufferer, as completely as
in that or your mo^t anxious and affeftionate friend,

W. H.

“ P.S.—If any of the incidents speedily take place
which your angelic mother announced to me in this
vision, I conjure you in her name, my dear Cowper,
to communicate them to me with all the kind despatch
that is due to the tender anxiety of sympathetic
affeaion! ”

The reft of Hayley’s plan is sufficiently apparent
from the letter.' It is a curious faft that his plans
always did seem to involve entering into communica¬
tion with eminent men; and he proposed, without of
course saying anything about the vision, to ask the
leaders of English public life referred to in it to
write letters of sympathy to Cowper, who, convinced
by this fulfilment of the Maternal Spirit’s prophecy
or the certainty of his salvation, would be immediately
restored to health and sanity. It was an ingenious
plan; but it was marred by one important defeft.
Hayley did not know any of the public men; it was
unlikely that he ever would; and even if he did
manage to scrape acquaintance with some of them,
there seemed not the smallest reason to suppose they
would agree to write an uninvited letter to a total
stranger on a delicate personal queilion ju^ because
Hayley asked them to. However, his optimiftic
spirit, intoxicated by the fertility of its own invention,
brushed all this aside. He was sure all that would
come right in the end: Providence could not fail to
assift any scheme for the cure of a man of genius.
Accordingly he sent the letter off to Cowper, and
communicated the plan to Johnny. Poor Johnny,
rendered desperate by two uninterrupted years of
Cowper’s society, welcomed the idea enthusiastically.

291 Life oj Cfmper

But Lady Hesketh, to whom he explained it, was
more doubtful. Of the general scheme of “ the
charming vision ” she approved; but its details
shocked her moral susceptibilities. These were
peculiar. She did not mind the whole thing being
a lie, but she did disapprove of Hayley saying he had
seen the throne of Goa, when he had not. And the
faft that he could do so reawakened her old suspicion
of his orthodoxy. “ I fear he is a Granger to the
Great Truths or Christianity,” she said. In addition
to this, her practical mind saw very clearly the difficulty
of procuring the required letters. However, she too
was glad or any scheme which might help Cowper,
and she volunteered to get into communication with
some of the public men.

It was thought unwise to attack the moil exalt.ed
Straight away. So, as a preliminary attempt, overtures
were made to Mr. Wilberforce, a Member of Parlia¬
ment, Lord Kenyon, a Judge, and three bishops. Dr.
Beadon of Gloucester, Dr. Watson of Llandaff and
Dr. Beilby Porteus of London. Their responses were
only partially satisfactory. Lord Kenyon, who was
approached through Rose, did not answer at all, and
Dr. Beadon wrote angrily, by the hand of a third
person, to say that he could not think of granting
such an extraordinary requeSt. On the other hand,
Mr. Wilberforce, Dr. Watson and Dr. Beilby Porteus
all wrote off admirable letters to Cowper immediately,
and Mr. Wilberforce even sent him a book he had
written. Fortified by this support, Hayley made
one more attempt on Lord Kenyon. This time, again
saying nothing of the vision, he persuaded Thurlow
to speak for him. But Thurlow’s pleadings had no
more effcCl on Lord Kenyon than Rose’s had done.
They were not, indeed, ardent. '* I have been
pressed,” began his letter, “ by one mad poet to ask of

The Stricken Deer 292

you for another a favour which savours of the malady
of both.”

Meanwhile the unhappy objeft of their schemes
had not readied satisfadlorily to them. To Hayley’s
original letter and to that of Mr. Wilberforce Cowper
had listened in gloomy apathy. And when that of Dr.
Porteus was read to him he had interrupted in a tone
of anguish: “It was written in derision—I am sure
of it.’’ “ Oh, no, no, no, my cousin,” protefted

Johnson, in shocked tones. “ Say not so of the good
Beilby, Bishop of London.” Cowper’s feelings were
made yet more explicit after Watson’s letter arrived.
Johnson and Miss Perowne, anxious to see what efFedl
it had had on him, carefully Peered the conversation
at dinner round to the subjedl of Hayley’s vision, and
Johnson said, as if by chance, that in this la^ letter
there seemed to be signs that its prophecies were being
fulfilled. “ Well,” said Cowper, “ be it so. I know
there is and I knew there would be, and,” he added
significantly, “ I knew what it meant.” If Hayley
and Johnson had listened more carefully to Cowper’s
ravings, they would have known too. Was it not
one of his chief causes of misery that he had been
explicitly told by God that any promise of hope he
might receive was given in mockery ? So that even
if he believed Hayley’s vision to be genuine, it would
be no comfort to him. But whatever their diagnosis
of his despair, it was clear to his friends that the
letters had done him no good; and the scheme dropped.
To the end of his days, however, Hayley would never
admit that it had failed. Cowper, he insifted, would
have been worse without it.

But the time for remedies, good or bad, was pail.
Cowper’s sufferings were nearly at their period.
Mary was already dead. In the winter of 1796 she
had begun to sink rapidly, and on the evening of

293 Cowper

December 17th it was realized that she could only
live a few hours. “ Is there life above ftairs, Sally ? ”
Cowper asked the maid who came to call him in the
morning. She said yes. He dressed, came down
and quietly asked Johnson to go on with the book
he had been reading to him. A few minutes later
Johnson was beckoned from the room to be told Mary
was dead. He came back, resumed reading, and
after a few pages flopped and broke the news. At
firft Cowper remained calm; but a few hours later he
was seized with a violent agitation. Wildly he pro-
tefted that he was sure Mary was not really dead,
that she would be buried alive and then wake in her
grave, and that if she did it would be his fault, as
he had been created to cause her every imaginable
suffering; and he demanded to see her. Johnson
took him up to her bedside. For a moment he con¬
tinued to protect that he could see her ilir, then,
as he looked more closely, he grew ^lill. The dis¬
tortions with which disease had disfigured her counte¬
nance were smoothed away, and she lay there, calm,
^rong and benignant as in former days. At length
she had been given back to him, by the hand of
death. For a long moment he gazed at her, a supreme,
unwavering look. Then, for the firft time since he
had left Wefton, his self-control completely forsook
him, and he Hung himself down in a torrent of sobbing.
It did not laft: after a few minutes he asked for a
glass of water, and recovered his composure. Nor
did anyone in the four years that remained to him of
life ever hear him mention her name again. He was
not told about her funeral, for fear of reviving his
agitation. A few nights later her body was secretly
hurried down the hill and buried in Dereham church
by torchlight.

It is not likely that Cowper would have broken

The Stricken Deer

294

down again even if he had known. For under the
continued pressure of misery the excitement which
had characterized his ftate of mind at Welton had
now given place to a dull apathy. It is beyond the
capacity of human nerves to continue in a ilate of
violent agitation for several years, even if faced by
the prospect of damnation. Cowper was acquainted
with sad misery as the tanned galley slave is with his
oar; and if custom had not made his suffering easier,
it had at leaft made him numb. As a consequence,
he began to appear more like his former self, tidier,
fatter, rosier; he had taken up some of his old
occupations, revising Homer, translating, and he
asked to be read aloud to. Johnson proposed reading
his own poems to him. Cowper refused to hear John
Gilpin: the contra^ between his present condition
and the care-free mood in which he had composed
it was too painful. But to the reft he liftened
calmly enough. More ftriking, during the laft
months of Mary’s life he had volunteered to read the
Bible to her if she wanted. And when the servants
trooped in for family prayers he no longer left the
room.

But of course none of this meant that he felt
any happier. Now his nerves were quieter he needed
diftraCIion to make the day pass. But none of
the diftraClions gave him any satisfaction. “ My
thoughts,” he writes, “ are like loose and dry sand,
which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner away.
Mr. Johnson reads to me, but I lose every sentence
through the inevitable wandering of my mind.” And
“ Wretch that I am,” his servant would hear him
mutter to himself, ” thus to wander in queft of false
delight.” As for his attending prayers and reading
the Bible, far from being signs of religious hope, they
only meant that he was now so hardened to the thought

295 Cvwper

of God's wrath that references to it no longer accentu¬
ated his suffering.

Nor had his visionary torments abated. He told
Johnny how his bedroom was every night the battle¬
ground of a druggie between good and evil spirits,
and how in the end the evil always vanquished the
good, and then “ Bring him out! ’’ they would cry,
“ bring him out! ” And even in the day when he
was sitting alone he would often look up and see a
spedlral figure advancing on him, who, with menacing
gestures, announced some fearful and immediate
doom. His disordered fancy played round his woes
in whimsical flourishes. One morning he told John¬
son that a spiritual voice had spoken this message to
him:

‘‘ Sadwin, I leave you with regret,

But you mu^ go to gaol for debt.”

“ EW you know the meaning of Sadwin, my
cousin ” said Johnson.

“ Yes,” replied Cowper, “ the winner of sorrow.”

Thus for four years longer dragged on the days.

From them one extraordinary incident ftands out.
Long ago at Olney Cowper had read a ^ory in Anson's
Voyages, It told how a sailor had fallen overboard in
the Atlantic; how his companions had vainly attempted
to save him; and how, after a long struggle, he had
succumbed. Now one day in March 1799, as he
was sitting loft as usual in aimless brooding, the
ftory ftrayed by chance into his mind, and immediately
arrefted his attention by the analogy it presented to
his own life. Had he not fallen early in life from
the ship which carried normal mankind from the
cradle to the grave.? Had not his friends tried to
save him in vain ? And now, after a lifetime of
ftruggling, was he not sinking exhaufted to death ?

The Stricken Deer 296

He, too, was a castaway, the caraway of humanity.
The ilory lit up his paft like a sudden flash of light¬
ning : Simulated by it his old powers of mind reasserted
themselves, the incoherent, lethargic muddle that
was his thoughts fell once more into order; and he
turned to survey, as from a high mountain, the whole
rugged path over which his ^eps had wandered since
they left the Berkhamfted vicarage sixty-nine years
before. As he looked, the accumulated anguish and
despair of his life of unparalleled disaster caught fire
and blazed up in a la^l towering flame of poetry.

“ Obscured night involv’d the sky,
Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,
When such a defin’d wretch as I,
Wash’d headlong from on board.
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft.
His floating home for ever left.

No braver chief could Albion boail
Than he with whom he went,

Nor ever ship left Albion’s coa^

With warmer wishes sent.

He lov’d them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again.

Not long beneath the whelming brine.
Expert to swim, he lay;

Nor soon he felt his Arength decline,
Or courage die away;

But wag’d with death a lading ftrife,
Supported by despair of life.

He shouted; nor his friends had fail’d
To check the vessel’s course.

But so the furious blaft prevail’d,
That, pitiless perforce,

They left their outcalk mate behind,
And scudded Hill before the wind.

297

Life oj Covoper

Some succour yet they could afford;

And, such as ^orms allow,

The cask, the coop, the floated cord,

Delay’d not to bc^ow.

But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,

Whate’er they gave, should visit more.

Nor, cruel as it seem’d, could he
Their halle himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea.
Alone could rescue them;

Yet bitter felt it ft ill to die
Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;

And so long he, with unspent pow’r,
His deftiny repell’d;

And ever, as the minutes flew.
Entreated help, or cried—Adieu !

At length, his transient respite paft,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in cv’ry blaft.
Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The ftifling wave, and then he sank.

No poet wept him : but the page
Of narrative sincere.

That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson’s tear.

And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream.
Descanting on his fate.

To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date ;

But misery ftill delights to trace
Its semblance in another’s case.

The Stricken Deer

298

No voice divine the Horm allay’d,

No light propitious shone;

When, snatch’d from all effcdhial aid,

We perish’d, each alone :

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.”

The verses are written in his charafteri^ic, simple
measures, in his charafteri^lic, formal language; but
the passion which informs their every line raises and
sustains them at a height he never touched before.
It is Cowper’s final considered and terrible judgment
on his own life: it is also the unique occasion on
which he enters the realm of great poetry. By the la^t
and mo^l baffling caprice of that deiliny whose play¬
thing he was, those affliftions againft which he had
exhausted his life in struggling, now, in the very
moment of his defeat, revealed themselves as the
instrument of his greateSt achievement. If Cowper
had been victorious in his Struggle, if he had van¬
quished his deformity and his delusions he might
never have been quickened to that intensity of feeling
in which alone the greatest art is born. Experience
taught him to repudiate life: but in that repudiation
his own life found at laSt its higheSt fulfilment.

He only lived for a year more. In January 1800
his health began to exhibit alarming symptoms; by
March he was confined to bed. He lingered another
month, watching the daylight wax and dwindle along
the dark-wainscoted walls of his bedroom, the brass
sphinx heads on its door. In a final dedication of his
afifeCIion Johnny threw himself into the task of nursing
him; and, with a passionate desire that Cowper should
once more see light before he died, and at leaSf leave
the world in hope, he sought with ardent words to
convince him of his salvation. But the evil fate which
so early had sworn itself Cowper’s comrade kept faith

299 Lije oj Cowper

with him to the end. He was to look his lail on a
world on which no thinned ray of hope had penetrated
the pervading shadow. He listened with his usual
^at% when Johnson spoke of the general truths of
Chri^lianity; but when he mentioned God’s love for
Cowper himself, the certain happiness that was pre¬
paring for him in the next world, he interrupted and
besought him to speak no more. One day the dodfor
asked him how he felt. “ Feel,” he replied, “ I feel
unutterable despair.” On the 19th of November he
was observed to be weakening. Throughout the
following night he lay, conscious and dfill. Once Miss
Perowne asked him if he wished for a drink, but he
refused. ” What does it signify” he said, wearily.
They were his ladl words. At five in the morning
he became unconscious; twelve hours later he ceased
to breathe. Then, and then only, was Johnny’s wish
granted. As he took a ladl look at the ^ill face, he
noticed with awe and amazement that on Cowper,
as on Mary, the healing hand of death had wrought
a change. The dlrain and the apathy which so long
had marked his wailed features were gone, and
inilead they lit up with a rapt, unearthly wonder,
“ a holy surprise.” Was it a mere chance effedl of
dissolution ? or could it be that during those hours
of unconsciousness a momentous event had taken
place in the unseen territories of Cowper’s spirit:
that on the very threshold of the grave it was vouch¬
safed to him, for the second time, to behold the
supreme vision of St. Alban’s; and gazing with
unveiled eye at the Beatific Glory, he learnt that, after
all, his despair had been founded on delusion ? We
shall never know.

He was buried in Dereham Church by the side of
Mary. And it was universally agreed among his
friends that his grave should be marked by a memorial.

The Stricken Deer 300

Memorials, however, are notoriously the subjeft of
controversy; nor was Cowper’s an exception. Lady
Hesketh wanted a plain slab of marble; anything
ornate, she said, “ tho’ quite in charafter for a grocer
or a soap boiler who had acquired Immense Wealth,
would be degrading to the Memory of Our Cousin.”
Hayley, on the other hand, anxious, no doubt, to do
honour to two geniuses at once, was in favour of a
more elaborate monument to be designed by Flax-
man. His proposal carried the day: and though
in general he cannot be looked on as a trustworthy
arbiter in matters of taSle, we cannot regret his suc¬
cess. For the memorial is so chara£leriSlic of the
period in general, and in particular of the little group
of people who erefted it. There in a transept of the
well-kept, unfrequented church, with the sunlight
shining mildly down on it through the painted
windows, and decently protefted by a neat railing, it
Still Stands, a block of dark marble. On the top,
carved in pure white, are disposed two volumes, the
Bible and “ The Task,” across them a classical palm
branch: below is Cowper’s name, and yet below that,
on two medallions, are those of Mary and Miss
Perowne. Underneath each is engraved an epitaph in
blank verse by Hayley.

It is the light of Cowper’s fame which has irradiated
the little circle of people round him, and so rescued
them from that darkness of forgotten time, in which
moSl of their contemporaries lie buried. When he
dies, it is withdrawn. But we have travelled so far
in their company that it may be permitted us, before
we say farewell, to watch the figures of his friends
as they grow dim and are lo^l in the encroaching
shadows of oblivion. Little Rose is the firil to
disappear. He had never swerved from the road
of conscientious self-improvement which he had

301 Lije oj Cowper

marked out for himself so early in life. He had
worked conscientiously, and not unsuccessfully, at
the Bar, conscientiously married, and was, by the
time Cowper died, already the conscientious father of
several children. But in 1804 he contrafted con¬
sumption ; and early in December of that year he
learnt from his dodlor that he had only a few weeks
to live. In these tragic circumifances his con¬
scientiousness assumed heroic proportions. He was
already supported by a lively religious faith; but he
had always doubted whether it refted on a sufficiently
strong intelle^al foundation. The lail days of his
life, therefore, he dedicated to reading Paley’s Evidences
and the works of Loudon. He was gratified to find
their arguments completely convincing. After this he
took a suitable farewell or his family; and, composed
to the la^, died on the 20th September.

Three years later he was followed by Lady Hesketh.
Hers was a happy nature, and in spite of Cowper her
laft years were very happy ones. She divided her
time between Bath, Clifton and Weymouth, had a
great many friends, wrote a great many letters, held
a great many ftrong opinions and took an intereft in
everything. Two events in particular gave her satis¬
faction. For one thing she aClually got to know the
King and Queen. One would have thought that to
meet George III and Queen Charlotte in their unlovely
old age muft have damped any loyalty, however
ardent. But Lady Hesketh’s was of a kina that burnt
all the higher for the intractability of the fuel which
it was forced to consume. The Queen’s face, she
said, was " full and convincing proof of the triumph
of Countenance over features ”; and as for the King,
he was “ so good, so pious, so kind and benevolent
to everybody that one cannot look at him without
wishing he might live forever 1 ” Her other source

The Stricken Deer

302

of especial pleasure was Hayley’s Life of Cowper,
which came out in 1802. There were two points
in it, indeed, to which she took exception. It empha¬
sized Cowper’s Whig views in a manner which she
felt would put the King againft him, and the fa£t
that she herself was mentioned in it by name offended
her sense of the decorous privacy which should shroud
an English lady. Surely, she said, Hayley could
have called her Lady Dash. But these small defers
were overwhelmed in the flood of delighted enthu¬
siasm into which she was thrown by the re^l of the
book.

“ Oh, my dear good Johnny! how can I ever
express or describe to you what I think of Cowper's
Life I —You, indeed, do right to call it The Life—it
is indeed The Life, and I hope there never will be
another of anybody—no one, indeed, should attempt
writing one who has not all the happy Talents and
all the Sensibility of our friend Hayley.” In 1807
her end came peacefully from mere old age.

Hayley’s was a ftormier voyage. Poor Hermit;
fate had treated him with an unmerited severity during
the la^l few years. Such fame as he had possessed
was diminishing; he was ftill in want of money!
and he, whose happiness depended so much on those
he loved, had lo^l Gibbon, Blake, Cowper and his
adored little son. For such disa^ers, the departure
of Eliza in 1797 from a world for which she was
unfitted was not a sufficient compensation. Still, he
had a gallant spirit; within a short time he had pulled
himself together; and a little battered, but ^lill undis¬
illusioned, was soon hard at work, as we have seen,
celebrating the virtues of those whose loss he deplored
by composing their epitaphs, writing their lives, and
promoting the ereftion of their monuments. In
1809 he had so far recovered his optimism as to marry

303 Lije of Cowper

again, a girl years younger than himself, but “ willing
to enliven with the songs of tenderness the solitude
of a poetical hermit.” Alas, his luck in domestic
matters had not turned; within four years his wife
had parted from him. He survived to write his
memoirs and die in 1820.

There remains Johnny. And of him there is little
to be said. When he saw Cowper laid in his grave,
the work which had made his life memorable was
done; and he retired to the peaceful, uneventful,
useful life of the prosperous country clergyman he
was. He married, had five children and lived till
1833. Before he died Cowper’s popularity had
already begun to wane. In the thirty years that had
elapsed since his death a revolution had taken place
in English letters: the monarchs of Auguftan
tradition had been caft from their thrones. And in
their ^ead a new race of poets—^youthful, lawless, hag¬
ridden with genius, catailrophic—commanded the
homage of the inconftant hearts of men.

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